Related papers: Black-hole mergers in disklike environments could …
Binary black hole mergers are among the most violent events in the Universe, leading to extreme warping of spacetime and copious emission of gravitational radiation. Even though black holes are the most compact objects they are not…
The interaction of binary black hole mergers with their environments can be studied using numerical relativity simulations. These start only a short finite time before merger, at which point appropriate initial conditions must be imposed. A…
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…
Binary neutron-star mergers will predominantly produce black-hole remnants of mass $\sim 3-4\,M_{\odot}$, thus populating the putative \emph{low mass gap} between neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes. If these low-mass black holes are…
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are promising environments for the assembly of merging binary black hole (BBH) systems. Interest in AGNs as nurseries for merging BBH is rising following the detection of gravitational waves from a BBH system…
It has been proposed that some black holes (BHs) in binary black hole (BBH) systems are born from "hierarchical mergers" (HM); i.e. earlier mergers of smaller BHs. These HM products have spin magnitudes $\chi \sim 0.7$, and, if they are…
Binary black hole spin measurements from gravitational wave observations can reveal the binary's evolutionary history. In particular, the spin orientations of the component black holes within the orbital plane, $\phi_1$ and $\phi_2$, can be…
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,…
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…
There is a high level of interest in black hole-neutron star binaries, not only because their mergers may be detected by gravitational wave observatories in the coming years, but also because of the possibility that they could explain a…
The possible formation mechanisms of massive close binary black holes (BHs) that can merge in the Hubble time to produce powerful gravitational wave bursts detected during advanced LIGO O1 and O2 science runs include the evolution from…
Massive black holes appear to be present in the nuclei of almost all galaxies, but their genesis and evolution are not well understood. As astrophysical black holes are completely characterized by their masses and spins, the observed joint…
Recently Venumadhav et al. (2019) proposed a new pipeline to analyze LIGO-Virgo's O1-O2 data and discovered eight new binary black hole (BBH) mergers, including a high effective spin, chi_{eff}, one. This discovery sheds new light on the…
The astrophysical origin of gravitational wave (GW) transients is a timely open question in the wake of discoveries by LIGO/Virgo. In active galactic nuclei (AGNs), binaries form and evolve efficiently by interaction with a dense population…
Gravitational wave signals from asymmetric binary black hole systems have been shown to exhibit additional chirps beyond the primary merger chirp in the post-merger region of the time-frequency domain. These secondary post-merger chirps…
We use the Monte Carlo For AGN (active galactic nucleus) Channel Testing and Simulation (McFACTS, https://www.github.com/mcfacts/mcfacts) code to study the effect of AGN disk and nuclear star cluster parameters on predicted mass…
An accurate and precise measurement of the spins of individual merging black holes is required to understand their origin. While previous studies have indicated that most of the spin information comes from the inspiral part of the signal,…
The localization of stellar-mass binary black hole mergers using gravitational waves is critical in understanding the properties of the binaries' host galaxies, observing possible electromagnetic emission from the mergers, or using them as…
The spins of binary black holes measured with gravitational waves provide insights about the formation, evolution, and dynamics of these systems. However, interpreting these measurements-especially for heavy black holes-remains an open…
The fourth gravitational-wave transient catalog, GWTC-4.0, reports 153 binary black hole mergers with false-alarm rates $<1,\mathrm{yr}^{-1}$. Chirp masses are typically measured well, with the smallest fractional uncertainty being $2%$ at…