Caroline Herschel Prize Lecture

Violent Beginnings Have Violent Ends: Deciphering the Origins of Binary Compact Object Collisions with Gravitational Waves

11 Nov 2026, 7.00pm to 8.30pm GMT
10 East, 0.17, University of Bath
You can attend this event in person or online.
This event is free

an artist's impression of one arm of one of the laser interferometers used to detect the gravitational waves, with a stylised space-time background containing merging binaries.

Caroline Herschel Prize

The Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship was established in 2018 by what is now the Herschel Society, in association with the Royal Astronomical Society, to celebrate Caroline’s memory by supporting promising women astronomers early in their careers. Caroline, William’s younger sister, started out as his assistant, but in time became recognised as an important astronomer in her own right, was the first to be paid as such, and was awarded the RAS Gold Medal in 1828. The Caroline Herschel Prize Lecture is hosted by University of Bath in November in cooperation with the Society as part of the University’s public lecture series.

Isobel's Lecture

When black holes and neutron stars collide, they mark the dramatic end of a long and sometimes violent history. Despite having detected almost 400 such collisions in gravitational waves since 2015, the formation scenarios of these enigmatic systems remain mysterious. The shapes of the binary orbits are a key clue: calm binary star evolution leads to circular orbits, while chaotic encounters in star clusters, galactic nuclei, and field triples can lead to dramatic deviations from circularity. In this lecture, Isobel will show how binaries with violent beginnings can be identified through tell-tale signatures of orbital eccentricity in gravitational wave signals.

Speaker

Isobel Romero-Shaw, an STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellow at Cardiff University, studies gravitational waves from black hole and neutron star mergers to understand how compact binaries form and collide.