Related papers: Viewpoint: The First Sounds of Merging Black Holes
Gravitational waves are oscillations of space-time that are created, for example, in black hole mergers. If these waves travel through another massive astrophysical object, they will undergo an effect called gravitational lensing, that will…
Current ground-based gravitational wave detectors are tuned to capture the collision of compact objects such as stellar origin black holes and neutron stars; over 20 such events have been published to date. Theoretically, however, more…
Massive merging black holes will be the primary sources of powerful gravitational waves at low frequency, and will permit to test general relativity with candidate galaxies close to a binary black hole merger. In this paper we identify the…
After a long wait, gravitational wave astronomy has finally begun. Binary black hole mergers are being detected by LIGO and Virgo, and theorists are starting to receive a wealth of data to be analized. At this point we can at long last…
We argue that near-future detections of gravitational waves from merging black hole binaries can test a long-standing proposal, originally due Bekenstein and Mukhanov, that the areas of black hole horizons are quantized in integer multiples…
Binary black holes are the most promising candidate sources for the first generation of earth-based interferometric gravitational-wave detectors. We summarize and discuss the state-of-the-art analytic techniques developed during the last…
In this short paper we discuss the possibility of testing the nature of astrophysical black holes using the recently observed black hole mergers. We investigate the possibility that a secondary black hole is created in the merger of two…
The first observational run of the Advanced LIGO detectors, from September 12, 2015 to January 19, 2016, saw the first detections of gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers. In this paper we present full results from a search for…
The gravitational wave signal of binary compact objects has two main contributions at frequencies below the characteristic merger frequency: the gravitational wave signal associated with the early inspiral stage of the binary and the…
The merger rate of black hole binaries inferred from the detections in the first Advanced LIGO science run, implies that a stochastic background produced by a cosmological population of mergers will likely mask the primordial…
Primordial Black Holes (PBH) can form in the early universe and might comprise a significant fraction of the dark matter. Interestingly, they are accompanied by the generation of Gravitational Wave (GW) signals and they could contribute to…
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…
In addition to producing loud gravitational waves (GW), the dynamics of a binary black hole system could induce emission of electromagnetic (EM) radiation by affecting the behavior of plasmas and electromagnetic fields in their vicinity. We…
Gravitational wave echoes provide our most direct and surprising observational window into quantum nature of black holes. Three years ago, the first search for echoes from Planck-scale modifications of general relativity near black hole…
The observation of gravitational waves emitted during the merging phase of compact binary coalescing objects has opened a new field of investigation in fundamental physics. It is now possible to test the predictions of General Relativity…
In the recent years, primordial black holes (PBHs) have emerged as one of the most interesting and hotly debated topics in cosmology. Among other possibilities, PBHs could explain both some of the signals from binary black hole mergers…
Particle physics and gravitational waves provide complementary probes of the deep structure of the Universe. Gravitational waves from the mergers of neutron stars and black holes are sensitive to the structure of dense quark matter and to…
A bulk acoustic wave cavity as high frequency gravitational wave antenna has recently detected two rare events at $5.5$MHz. Assuming that the detected events are due to gravitational waves, their characteristic strain amplitude lies at…
On August 17, 2017 the LIGO-Virgo collaboration detected for the first time gravitational waves from the binary merger of two neutron stars (GW170817). Unlike the merger of two black holes, the associated electromagnetic radiation was also…
On September 14 2015, the LIGO interferometers captured a gravitational wave (GW) signal from two merging black holes (BHs), opening the era of GW astrophysics. Five BH mergers have been reported so far, three of them involving massive BHs…