Related papers: Self-intersecting marginally outer trapped surface…
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…
Are the stellar-mass merging binary black holes, recently detected by their gravitational wave signal, of stellar or primordial origin? Answering this question will have profound implications for our understanding of the Universe, including…
We present numerical simulations of a Kerr black hole perturbed by a pulse of ingoing gravitational radiation. For strong perturbations we find up to five concentric marginally outer trapped surfaces. These trapped surfaces appear and…
Gravitational waves can provide crucial insights about the environments in which black holes live. In this work, we use numerical relativity simulations to study the behaviour of self-interacting scalar (wave-like) dark matter clouds…
We discuss the properties of stellar mass black hole (BH) mergers induced by tidal encounters with a massive BH at galactic centres or potentially in dense star clusters. The tidal disruption of stellar binaries by a massive BH is known to…
Recent observations and stellar dynamics simulations suggest that thousand solar mass black holes can form in compact massive young star clusters. Any such clusters in the bulge of their host galaxy will spiral to the center within a few…
Gravitational waves (GWs) offer an unprecedented opportunity to survey the sky and detect mergers of compact objects. While intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) have not been detected beyond any reasonable doubt with either dynamical or…
The recent discovery of the binary black hole (BBH) merger event GW190521, between two black holes (BHs) of $\approx100M_\odot$, and as well as other massive BBH merger events involving BHs within the pair-instability supernova (PSN) mass…
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…
In this work we evaluate whether the gravitational wave background recently observed by a number of different pulsar timing arrays could be due to merging primordial supermassive black hole binaries. We find that for homogeneously…
Modeling the late inspiral and merger of supermassive black holes is central to understanding accretion processes and the conditions under which electromagnetic emission accompanies gravitational waves. We use fully general relativistic,…
Dark matter overdensities around black holes can be searched for by looking at the characteristic imprint they leave on the gravitational waveform of binary black hole mergers. Current theoretical predictions of the density profile of dark…
We consider the spatial clustering of massive black hole (MBH) mergers, and discuss possible ways to use gravitational wave observations in the LISA and DECIGO/BBO range for obtaining cosmological and cosmogonical information. Constraints…
In this paper, we study the stability of marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTS), foliating horizons of the form $r=X(\tau)$, embedded in locally rotationally symmetric class II perfect fluid spacetimes. An upper bound on the area of…
Evidence for a stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background, plausibly originating from the merger of supermassive black holes (SMBHs), is accumulating with observations from pulsar timing arrays. An outstanding question is how inspiraling…
While supermassive binary black holes inspiral toward merger they may also experience significant accretion of matter from a surrounding disk. We study the dynamics of this system, simultaneously describing the evolving spacetime and…
Star clusters can interact and merge in galactic discs, halos, or centers. We present direct N-body simulations of binary mergers of star clusters with $M_{\star} = 2.7 \times 10^4 \: \mathrm{M_{\odot}}$ each, using the N-body code BIFROST…
We construct the marginal loosely trapped surface (marginal LTS) for the Kerr spacetime with a small Kerr parameter perturbatively, where the LTS condition is saturated. An LTS is a surface that specifies the strong gravity region, which is…
We investigate the consequences of a model of the assembly and growth of massive black holes from primordial seeds, remnants of the first generation of stars in a hierarchical structure formation scenario. Our model traces the build-up of…
Recent breakthroughs in the field of numerical relativity have led to dramatic progress in understanding the predictions of General Relativity for the dynamical interactions of two black holes in the regime of very strong gravitational…