"Some recent results in gravitational-wave science"
The era of gravitational-wave astrophysics and cosmology has begun. We'll discuss some recent results, focusing on constraints that come from the population of gravitational-wave events. Topics will include the lower (between neutron stars and black holes) and the upper (due to pair-instability supernovae) mass gaps, standard siren cosmology, and recent events including GW190814 (with a secondary object that might be a neutron star or a black hole; we're not sure which) and GW190521 (with two black holes potentially in...
"New test of the black hole metric with EHT images of Sgr A*"
Our understanding of astrophysical black holes is predicated on the assumption that they are well described by the Kerr solution to Einstein’s equations. A promising avenue for testing the Kerr hypothesis is to detect the shadow a black hole casts on the surrounding emission and compare its size and shape to the predictions of the Kerr metric. New horizon-scale images of the Galactic Center black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) recently published by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) allow for new strong-field tests... Read more about ITC Colloquium - Lia Medeiros (IAS)
"The ASTRID simulation: the evolution of massive black holes"
The launch of the next-generation telescopes will soon revolutionize the study of the high-redshift universe and allow us to better understand the evolution of the first galaxies and supermassive black holes. Making full use of future observations will require a new generation of cosmological simulations with large volumes for statistical samples of large structures and with high resolution to model the galaxy formation. In this talk, I will introduce the ASTRID simulation, one of the...
Neutron star mergers provide a unique probe of the dense matter equation of state (EOS) across a wide range of parameter space, from the cold and equilibrated matter of the inspiral, to the shock-heated and higher-density conditions that govern the post-merger evolution. In this talk, I will start with an overview of what we...