Globular clusters as gravitational wave factories
The dense environments in the center of globular clusters lead to an abundance of binary black hole mergers, potentially detectable by LIGO.
Opening Our Ears to the Universe: LIGO Observes Gravitational Waves!
A century after Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves, LIGO has observed these minuscule ripples in the fabric of spacetime. A new window to the Universe has opened.
Radio Crickets: A New Probe of General Relativity
Today’s astrobite is not about disc jockey insects informing us about spacetime. Read on to find out a novel way of detecting electromagnetic counterparts of merging supermassive black holes.
“Your heart sounds just fine, PSO J334.2028+01.4075”
Quasar PSO J334.2028+01.4075 has a very healthy heart rate of 6.7 beats per decade, or once every 542 days. One explanation is that this guy hosts a pair of supermassive black holes. If true, then the astonishing interpretation of this quasar’s heart rate is that its black holes are only a few orbits away from merging!
Flying Free: A Supermassive Black Hole Kicked Out Of Its Galaxy
The space between galaxies, long thought to be a near empty void, is now rapidly being revealed to be home to a host of astronomical phenomena. Now astronomers may have added a new type of intergalactic resident to the list: a super-massive black hole, a million times the mass of the Sun, kicked out from its home galaxy.
Gravitational waves and the need for fast galaxy surveys
In the next few years, gravitational wave detectors are expected to start finding mergers of compact objects. But their resolution is limited to large areas of the sky. Fast galaxy surveys are needed to aid in the task of locating the source more precisely, but how fast can they go?