Probing supermassive black hole mergers with pulsar timing
Date
Thursday February 28, 201910:30 am - 11:30 am
Location
Stirling 501 (with overflow seating in room 401)Event Category
Chiara Mingarelli
Flatiron Institute, Center for Computational Astrophysics
Abstract
Galaxy mergers are a standard aspect of galaxy formation and evolution, and most (likely all) large galaxies contain supermassive black holes. As part of the merging process, the supermassive black holes should in-spiral together and eventually merge, generating a background of gravitational radiation in the nanohertz regime. An array of precisely timed pulsars spread across the sky can form a galactic-scale gravitational wave detector in this band. I describe the current efforts to develop and extend the pulsar timing array concept, together with recent limits which have emerged from international efforts to constrain astrophysical phenomena at the heart of supermassive black hole mergers.