Related papers: Gravitational Recoil from Binary Black Hole Merger…
Gravitational wave observations of eccentric binary black hole mergers will provide unequivocal evidence for the formation of these systems through dynamical assembly in dense stellar environments. The study of these astrophysically…
We present results from several simulations of equal mass black holes with spin. The spin magnitudes are $S/m^2=0.8$ in all cases, but we vary the spin orientations arbitrarily, in and outside the orbital plane. We find that in all but one…
We perform magnetohydrodynamic simulations in full general relativity of disk accretion onto nonspinning black hole binaries with mass ratio 36:29. We survey different disk models which differ in their scale height, total size and magnetic…
We investigate the impact of gravitational-wave (GW) recoil on the growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the early Universe. Forming 10^9 Solar Mass SMBHs by z=6 is challenging and may require hierarchical mergers of smaller seed…
Gravitational waves from sub-solar mass inspiraling compact objects would provide almost smoking-gun evidence for primordial black holes (PBHs). We perform the first search for inspiraling planetary-mass compact objects in equal-mass and…
Observations of gravitational waves from massive binary black hole systems at cosmological distances can be used to search for a dependence of the speed of propagation of the waves on wavelength, and thereby to bound the mass of a…
We perform the first fully nonlinear numerical simulations of black-hole binaries with mass ratios 100:1. Our technique for evolving such extreme mass ratios is based on the moving puncture approach with a new gauge condition and an optimal…
During their first observational run, the two Advanced LIGO detectors attained an unprecedented sensitivity, resulting in the first direct detections of gravitational-wave signals and GW151226, produced by stellar-mass binary black hole…
We discuss the transition from quasi-circular inspiral to plunge of a system of two nonrotating black holes of masses $m_1$ and $m_2$ in the extreme mass ratio limit $m_1m_2\ll (m_1+m_2)^2$. In the spirit of the Effective One Body (EOB)…
Understanding the fate of merging supermassive black holes in galactic mergers, and the gravitational wave emission from this process, are important LISA science goals. To this end, we present results from numerical relativity simulations…
Knowledge of the spin of the black hole resulting from the merger of a generic black-hole binary is of great importance for studying the cosmological evolution of supermassive black holes. Several attempts have been made to model the spin…
When two black holes merge, a tremendous amount of energy is released in the form of gravitational radiation in a short span of time, making such events among the most luminous phenomenon in the universe. Models that predict the peak…
The ringdown phase of a black hole formed from the merger of two orbiting black holes is described by means of the close-limit (CL) approximation starting from second-post-Newtonian (2PN) initial conditions. The 2PN metric of point-particle…
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…
Gravitational wave detections are starting to allow us to probe the physical processes in the evolution of very massive stars through the imprints they leave on their final remnants. Stellar evolution theory predicts the existence of a gap…
We report on simulations in general relativity of magnetized disks onto black hole binaries. We vary the binary mass ratio from 1:1 to 1:10 and evolve the systems when they orbit near the binary-disk decoupling radius. We compare (surface)…
We examine the gravitational wave recoil waves and the associated net kick velocities in non-axisymmetric Robinson-Trautman spacetimes. We use characteristic initial data for the dynamics corresponding to non-head-on collisions of black…
We present results on the mass and spin of the final black hole from mergers of equal mass, spinning black holes. The study extends over a broad range of initial orbital configurations, from direct plunges to quasi-circular inspirals to…
Finding electromagnetic (EM) counterparts of future gravitational wave (GW) sources would bring rich scientific benefits. A promising possibility, in the case of the coalescence of a super-massive black hole binary (SMBHB), is that prompt…
We present accurate fits for the remnant properties of generically precessing binary black holes, trained on large banks of numerical-relativity simulations. We use Gaussian process regression to interpolate the remnant mass, spin, and…