Speaker
Description
The LIGO experiment has detected mergers between stellar-mass black
holes, and pulsar timing arrays on the ground have discovered a
stochastic background of gravitational waves attributable to merging
massive black hole binaries. The LISA satellites, planned in space in
the mid 2030s, are expected to detect gravitational waves (GWs) from
individual massive black hole binaries at high signal-to-noise. These
black hole mergers should often take place in gas-rich galactic
nuclei, and therefore should also produce concurrent electromagnetic
(EM) emission.
In this talk, I will highlight the importance of these black hole
mergers for astrophysics, cosmology, and fundamental physics, and
emphasize the additional science potential of joint GW and EM
detections. I will then discuss our recent work on the coupled
dynamics of a BH binary with circumbinary gas, focusing on the
expected characteristics of the EM emission from such a system.
I will present BH binary candidates based on these signatures, and
discuss the challenges and future work needed to confirm these
binaries and to realize their science potential.
