European Week of Astronomy and Space Science | 2018 Apr 02
Gravitational waves may be forged in the heart of the galaxy, says a new study led by PhD student Joseph Fernandez ...
observations show that BH mergers are commonplace in the Universe. However, we are still not sure how these sort of binary systems form. This is because they need to be on very close or very eccentric orbits in order to collapse in such a way that GWs are observable.
Fernandez and colleagues, including another PhD student Brown, have shown that the orbits of binaries can be changed by the black hole that lies in the centre of most galaxies, including our own. ...
Binaries can emerge from the tidal encounter undisrupted under certain conditions, with their orbits suffering severe modifications. By using Monte Carlo simulations, Fernandez has shown that surviving BH binary systems can become tight and eccentric, reducing the merging time by over a factor of 100 in 10% of cases. ...
