March 4, 2024
And the second paper on the arxiv today is Daria’s masterpiece! pAGN (which Daria says you should read “pagan”) is a brand new, super cool code that implements the hydrodynamics of AGN disks, at least in their most popular one-dimensional … Continue reading
May 30, 2023
We do population analysis in gravitational waves all the time now. That is: we compare many observations from GW experiments against many simulated datapoints from simulations. But what if you only have one observation? That could be a LIGO guy … Continue reading
November 15, 2022
We want more! With gravitational-wave data, some quantities like the masses of the black holes are much easier to see than others. But those others are very interesting, notably spins that process and orbits that are eccentric, because they would … Continue reading
November 2, 2022
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 … Continue reading
May 25, 2022
Big stars burn everything they have, die fast, and produce big black holes. So when you see two black holes together, it’s likely that the big black hole comes from the big star. Or maybe not? Before dying, the big … Continue reading
November 17, 2021
Breaking things is fun! In the previous paper of this series, we looked at accretion disks around massive black-hole binaries and found things were going awry. We kept on finding configurations that our implementation could not handle… And now we … Continue reading
June 12, 2020
Supermassive black hole inspiral and spin evolution are deeply connected. In the early stages when black holes are brought together by star scattering and accretion, spin orientations can change because of interactions with the environment. Later on, when gravitational waves … Continue reading
April 8, 2020
New paper today! We’ve been working on this for a very long time but three weeks of lockdown forced us to finish it. It’s about distorted (aka warped) accretion discs surrounding black holes. If the black hole is spinning and … Continue reading
May 30, 2019
Spoiler alert: this paper is a bit sad. Stellar-mass black-hole binaries are now detected by LIGO on a weekly basis. It would be really cool if LISA (a future space mission targeting low-frequencies gravitational waves) could see them as well. … Continue reading
March 23, 2015
Supermassive black holes in binaries and their accretion discs… Spins align on some timescale, but migration also takes place. Do gas discs have enough time to align the spins? Well, the secret is the mass ratio: light secondaries might prevent … Continue reading
May 8, 2014
Black-hole kicks are powerful. I mean, really powerful. They can even eject supermassive black holes from the heavier galaxies in our Universe. And then these galaxies are left “empty”… Davide Gerosa, Alberto Sesana.Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 446 (2015) … Continue reading
November 1, 2012
My very first paper was on alignment between supermassive black holes and their accretion disks. Maybe it takes a bit longer… Giuseppe Lodato, Davide Gerosa. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters 429 (2013) L30-L34.arXiv:1211.0284 [astro-ph.CO].