Speaker
Dr
Colin DeGraf
(University of Cambridge)
Description
With detections of supermassive black hole mergers expected in the near future from LISA and PTAs, now is the ideal time to make predictions on what we can expect from them. Using high-resolution cosmological simulations, I will discuss the expected merger and detection rates for such black hole mergers, including the need to incorporate inspiral/hardening times, with particular emphasis on the impact the merger timescale has on the merging masses. Furthermore, I will discuss what we can expect for the morphologies of the galaxies which host SMBH mergers (important for multimessenger followup observations to gravitational wave detections), and show that we can expect the host morphologies to exhibit evidence of recent galaxy mergers, with the strongest morphological signals at z~0.5 and typically surviving on the order of ~500 Myr.
Primary author
Dr
Colin DeGraf
(University of Cambridge)
