Unfortunately this event has been cancelled. Our apologies for any inconvenience. 

Original Posting:

“Binary supermassive black holes: the hunt is on”

We are seeking both light and gravitational waves from binary supermassive black holes, the biggest, meanest discrete binary systems in the Universe. When two supermassive binary black holes pair up as a binary at the center of a merger remnant, during their inspiral and coalescence phases, they will produce intense gravitational radiation.

We expect to detect this radiation with gravitational-wave observatories like Pulsar Timing Arrays and LISA in the coming decade.

Pulsar timing arrays use distributed networks of pulsars to sense these waves as they pass through our galaxy; in effect, they are an observatory on a Galactic scale. If black holes in-spiral in an isolated environment, we should by now have already detected nanohertz-frequency gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays… or so we thought. This talk will discuss pulsar timing arrays and what our latest, most stringent limits on gravitational waves mean for galaxy evolution and supermassive binary black holes. I will also briefly discuss efforts to discover both gravitational and electromagnetic waves from binary supermassive black holes.