Together with my postdoc Nate, we’re proceeding our investigations on supermassive, spinning binary black holes surrounded by accretion disks (that is: a ton of gas around big monsters at the center of galaxies!). In today’s paper, we dig a bit deeper into what happens when the disk breaks. That presumably stops the interactions between the gas and the black-hole spins which could make all this funky astrophysics (spins that moves, disks that breaks, etc) actually observable with future gravitational-wave detectors. More needs to be done of course, but here we are.

Nathan Steinle, Davide Gerosa.
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 519 (2023) 5031–5042.
arXiv:2211.00044 [astro-ph.HE].