Related papers: A complete measurement of a black-hole recoil thro…
During the inspiral and merger of a binary black hole, gravitational radiation is emitted anisotropically due to asymmetries in the merger configuration. This anisotropic radiation leads to a gravitational wave kick, or recoil velocity, as…
Galactic bulges are known to harbour central black holes whose mass is tightly correlated with the stellar mass and velocity dispersion of the bulge. In a hierarchical universe, mergers of subgalactic units are accompanied by the…
Black holes in General Relativity are famously characterized by two "hairs" only, the mass and the spin of the Kerr spacetime. Theories extending General Relativity, however, allow in principle for additional black hole charges, which will…
A study is made of the behavior of massive black holes in disk galaxies that have received an impulsive kick from a merger or a sustained acceleration from an asymmetric jet. The motion of the gas, stars, dark matter, and massive black hole…
Among the expected sources of gravitational waves for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is the capture of solar-mass compact stars by massive black holes residing in galactic centers. We construct a simple model for such a…
Gravitational waves from precessing black-hole binaries exhibit features that are absent in nonprecessing systems. The most prominent of these is a parity-violating asymmetry that beams energy and linear momentum preferentially along or…
In February 2016 the first observation of gravitational waves were reported. The source of this event, denoted as GW150914, was identified as the merger of two black holes with a about 30 solar masses each, at a distance of approximately…
It is shown that the spectral amplitude of gravitational-wave (GW) ringdown of a Kerr black hole sourced by an extreme mass ratio merger can be modeled by the $\textit{greybody factor}$, which quantifies the scattering nature of the black…
The ''ringdown'' stage of gravitational-wave signals from binary black hole mergers, mainly consisting of a superposition of quasinormal modes emitted by the merger remnant, is a key tool to test fundamental physics and to probe black hole…
Black hole (BH) oscillations known as quasi-normal modes (QNMs) are one of the most important gravitational wave (GW) sources. We propose that higher perturbative order of QNMs, generated by nonlinear gravitational interaction near the BHs,…
We introduce a new technique to search for gravitational wave events from compact binary mergers that produce a clear signal only in a single gravitational wave detector, and marginal signals in other detectors. Such a situation can arise…
Quasinormal modes of rapidly rotating black holes were recently computed in a generic effective-field-theory extension of general relativity with higher-derivative corrections. We exploit this breakthrough to perform the most complete…
After black holes collide, the remnant settles to a stationary state by emitting gravitational waves. Once non-linearities subside, these ringdown waves are dominated by exponentially-damped sinusoids, or quasinormal modes. We develop a…
When two black holes merge, the late stage of gravitational wave emission is a superposition of exponentially damped sinusoids. According to the black hole no-hair theorem, this ringdown spectrum depends only on the mass and angular…
According to recent general-relativistic simulations, the coalescence of two spinning black holes (BHs) could lead to recoil speeds of the BH remnant of up to thousands of km/s as a result of the emission of gravitational radiation. Such…
Recent observations of massive galaxies indicate that they double in mass and quintuple in size between redshift z = 1 and the present, despite undergoing very little star formation, suggesting that galaxy mergers drive the evolution. Since…
We analyze the event GW 150914 announced by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) as the gravitational-wave emission of a black-hole binary merger. We show that the parameters of the coalescing system and…
Ultra-wide triple black-holes (TBHs; with an outer orbit $>10^3$ AU) in the field can be considerably perturbed by flyby encounters with field stars by the excitation of the outer orbit eccentricities. We study the cumulative effect of such…
Using black hole perturbation theory, we calculate the gravitational waves produced by test particles moving on bound geodesic orbits about rotating black holes. The orbits we consider are generic - simultaneously eccentric and inclined.…
We perform a long-duration Bayesian analysis of gravitational-wave data to constrain the near-horizon geometry of black holes formed in binary mergers. Deviations from the Kerr geometry are parameterized by replacing the horizon's absorbing…