Related papers: The spin-flip phenomenon in supermassive black hol…
Binary black holes occupy a special place in our quest for understanding the evolution of galaxies along cosmic history. If massive black holes grow at the center of (pre-)galactic structures that experience a sequence of merger episodes,…
Recent calculations of gravitational radiation recoil generated during black-hole binary mergers have reopened the possibility that a merged binary can be ejected even from the nucleus of a massive host galaxy. Here we report the first…
Understanding the predictions of general relativity for the dynamical interactions of two black holes has been a long-standing unsolved problem in theoretical physics. Black-hole mergers are monumental astrophysical events, releasing…
Mergers of black-hole binaries are expected to release large amounts of energy in the form of gravitational radiation. However, binary evolution models predict merger rates too low to be of observational interest. In this paper we explore…
We study the evolution of a massive black hole pair in a rotationally supported nuclear disc. The distributions of stars and gas mimic the nuclear region of a gas-rich galaxy merger remnant. Using high-resolution SPH simulations, we follow…
The gravitational recoil or "kick" of a black hole formed from the merger of two orbiting black holes, and caused by the anisotropic emission of gravitational radiation, is an astrophysically important phenomenon. We combine (i) an earlier…
Using recent results from numerical relativity simulations of black hole mergers, we revisit previous studies of cosmological black hole spin evolution. We show that mergers are very unlikely to yield large spins, unless alignment of the…
The observation of gravitational-waves from merging supermassive black holes will be transformative: the detection of a low-frequency gravitational-wave background can tell us if and how supermassive black holes merge, inform our knowledge…
The observability of gravitational waves from supermassive and intermediate-mass black holes by the forecoming Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), and the physics we can learn from the observations, will depend on two basic factors:…
Recent gravitational wave observations include possible detections of black hole - neutron star binary mergers. As with binary black hole mergers, numerical simulations help characterize the sources. For binary systems with neutron star…
The gravitational waves emitted (some time) after two black holes merge are well described by the theory of linear perturbations on a spacetime characterized by the mass and spin of the remnant. However, in the very early stages right after…
Repeated black-hole mergers in dense stellar clusters are a plausible mechanism to populate the predicted gap in black hole masses due to the pair-instability supernova process. These hierarchical mergers carry distinct spin characteristics…
We report the first results from evolutions of a generic black-hole binary, i.e. a binary containing unequal mass black holes with misaligned spins. Our configuration, which has a mass ratio of 2:1, consists of an initially non-spinning…
The association of an electromagnetic signal with the merger of a pair of supermassive black holes would have many important implications. For example, it would provide new information about gas and magnetic field interactions in dynamical…
The accretion disk that forms after a neutron star merger is a source of neutron-rich ejecta. The ejected material contributes to a radioactively-powered electromagnetic transient, with properties that depend sensitively on the composition…
Supermassive black hole mergers with spin-flips accelerate energetic particles through their precessing relativistic jets, producing high energy neutrinos and finally gravitational waves. In star formation massive stars come in pairs,…
On September 14, 2015 at 09:50:45 UTC the two detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory simultaneously observed a transient gravitational-wave signal. The signal sweeps upwards in frequency from 35 to 250 Hz with…
This a particularly exciting time for gravitational wave physics. Ground-based gravitational wave detectors are now operating at a sensitivity such that gravitational radiation may soon be directly detected, and recently several groups have…
The first direct detections of gravitational waves from merging binary black holes open a unique window into the binary black hole formation environment. One promising environmental signature is the angular distribution of the black hole…
A perturbed black hole emits gravitational radiation, usually termed the ringdown signal, whose frequency and time-constant depends on the mass and spin of the black hole. I investigate the case of a binary black hole merger resulting from…