Related papers: The binary black hole explorer: on-the-fly visuali…
If supermassive black holes (BHs) are generically present in galaxy centers, and if galaxies are built up through hierarchical merging, BH binaries are at least temporary features of most galactic bulges. Observations suggest, however, that…
In the last few years before merger, supermassive black hole binaries will rapidly inspiral and precess in a magnetic field imposed by a surrounding circumbinary disk. Multiple simulations suggest this relative motion will convert some of…
Black hole (BH) mergers driven by gravitational perturbations of external companions constitute an important class of formation channels for merging BH binaries detected by LIGO. We have studied the orbital and spin evolution of binary BHs…
Strong gravitational lensing can produce multiple images of the same gravitational-wave signal, each arriving at different times and with different magnification. Previous work has explored if lensed pairs exist among the known…
Binary-black-hole orbits precess when the black-hole spins are mis-aligned with the binary's orbital angular momentum. The apparently complicated dynamics can in most cases be described as simple precession of the orbital angular momentum…
Since the initial detection of Gravitational Waves in 2015, 50 candidate events have been reported by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration. As the current generation of detectors move towards their design sensitivity the rate of these…
Binary-black-hole (BBH) mergers can take place close to a supermassive black hole (SMBH) while being in a bound orbit around the SMBH. In this paper, we study such bound triple systems and show that including the strong gravity effects of…
The coalescences of massive black hole binaries are one of the main targets of space-based gravitational wave observatories. Such gravitational wave sources are expected to be accompanied by electromagnetic emissions. Low latency detection…
The Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors opened a new era to study black holes (BHs) in our Universe. A population of stellar-mass binary BHs (BBHs) are discovered to be heavier than previously expected. These heavy BBHs provide us an…
The LIGO/Virgo detections of binary black hole mergers marked a watershed moment in astronomy, ushering in the era of precision tests of Kerr dynamics. We review theoretical and experimental challenges that must be overcome to carry out…
Angular momentum and spin precession are expected to be generic features of a significant fraction of binary black hole systems. As such, it is essential to have waveform models that faithfully incorporate the effects of precession. Here,…
Gravitational radiation arising from the inspiral and merger of binary black holes (BBH's) is a promising candidate for detection by kilometer-scale interferometric gravitational wave observatories. This paper discusses a serious obstacle…
While the Advanced LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave experiments now regularly observe binary black hole mergers, the evolutionary origin of these events remains a mystery. Analysis of the binary black hole spin distribution may shed light…
The ringdown phase following a binary black hole merger is usually assumed to be well described by a linear superposition of complex exponentials (quasinormal modes). In the strong-field conditions typical of a binary black hole merger,…
Gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers provide a glimpse of gravitational dynamics in its most extreme observable regime, potentially enabling precision tests of general relativity (GR) and of the Kerr description of black…
Observation and characterisation of gravitational waves from binary black holes requires accurate knowledge of the expected waveforms. The late inspiral and merger phase of the waveform is obtained through direct numerical integration of…
We present a highly accurate, fully analytical model for the late inspiral, merger, and ringdown of black-hole binaries with arbitrary mass ratios and spin vectors, including the contributions of harmonics beyond the fundamental mode. This…
The discovery of the gravitational-wave source GW150914 with the Advanced LIGO detectors provides the first observational evidence for the existence of binary black-hole systems that inspiral and merge within the age of the Universe. Such…
While the majority of gravitational wave (GW) events observed by the LIGO and Virgo detectors are consistent with mergers of binary black holes (BBHs) on quasi-circular orbits, some events are also consistent with non-zero orbital…
Gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers have allowed us to directly observe stellar-mass black hole binaries for the first time, and therefore explore their formation channels. One of the ways to infer how a binary system is…