LISA Science and Prospects

The LISA gravitational wave mission will explore the mHz band of the gravitational wave spectrum, where there are many known and highly probable sources, but also the possibility of surprises. The LISA mission has a wide range of science goals including: tracing the origin, growth and merger histories of massive Black Holes across cosmic time; studying the formation and evolution of compact binary stars and the structure of the Milky Way Galaxy; probing the central regions of galaxies using extreme mass-ratio inspirals; exploring the fundamental nature of gravity and Black Holes; and producing independent measurements of the Hubble expansion rate. In addition, LISA may uncover signals from the very early Universe that provide a window into TeV-scale particle physics, and perhaps most excitingly of all, discover entirely new and unforeseen astrophysical sources and phenomena.