July 15, 2020
And here is my latest lockdown effort: some experiments in the wonderful and perilous world of machine learning. The idea of this paper is to teach a computer to figure out by itself if a gravitational-wave signal will be detectable … 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
May 20, 2020
If General Relativity is too boring, couple it to something else. In this paper we study what happens to stellar collapse and supernova explosions if gravity is transmitted not only with the usual metric of Einstein’s theory (aka the graviton) … Continue reading
May 12, 2020
The latest news from our LIGO/Virgo friends (including some colleagues here in Birmingham) was an astrophysical surprise. The black-hole binary GW190412 is just different from every other one we have had so far. One of the two black holes is about three times larger … Continue reading
May 6, 2020
A black-hole binary starts its life as two single black holes, and finish it as a single black hole. In between there’s all the complicated dynamics predicted by General Relativity: many orbits, dissipation of energy via gravitational waves, spins that … 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
April 3, 2020
We’ve been knowing about the mass gap for a while, but I bet “spin gap” sounds new to you, uh? The gap in the spectrum of binary black hole masses is due to pair-instability supernovae (i.e. what happens if a … Continue reading
March 5, 2020
Sometimes you have to look into things twice. We found the up-down instability back in 2015 and still did not really understand what was going on. Three out of four black hole binaries with spins aligned to the orbital angular … Continue reading
February 26, 2020
The LISA data analysis problem is going to be massive: tons of simultaneous sources all together at the same time. In Birmingham we are developing a new scheme to tackle the problem, and here are the first outcomes. We populate … Continue reading
February 26, 2020
The Milky Way, our own Galaxy, is not alone. We’re part of a galaxy cluster, but closer in we have some satellites. The bigger ones are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (which unfortunately I’ve never seen because they are … Continue reading
January 28, 2020
LISA is going to be cool. And not just for your astro-related dreams. Theoretical physicists can have fun too! This community-wide manifesto illustrates just how cool things are going to be with LISA. LISA will constitute a major milestone to … Continue reading
October 3, 2019
Today’s paper is about superkicks. These are extreme configurations of black hole binaries which receive a large recoil. Black hole recoils work much like those of, say, a cannon. As the cannonball flies, the cannon recoils backwards. Here the binary … Continue reading
September 17, 2019
Gravitational-wave astronomy is, seems obvious to say, about doing astronomy with gravitational waves. One has gravitational-wave observations (thanks LIGO and Virgo!) on hand and astrophysical models on the other hand. The more closely these two sides interact, the more we … Continue reading
September 13, 2019
What’s in between neutron stars and black holes? It looks like neutron stars have a maximum mass of about 2 solar masses while black holes have a minimum mass of about 5. So what’s in between? That’s the popular issue … Continue reading
June 14, 2019
Funny things happen in supernova explosions. Funny and complicated. If the star is too massive, the explosion is unstable. The black hole it formed it not as massive as it could have been. In gravitational-wave astronomy, this means that we … Continue reading
June 12, 2019
LIGO and Virgo are up and running like crazy. They started their third observing run (O3) and in just a few months doubled the catalogs of observing events. And there’s so much more coming! In this paper we try to … 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
May 28, 2019
Where do black holes come from? Sounds like a scify book title, but it’s real. These days, that’s actually the million dollar question in gravitational-wave astronomy. LIGO sees (lots of!) black holes in binaries, and those data encode information on … Continue reading
May 24, 2019
Surrogate models are the best of both worlds. Numerical-relativity simulations are accurate but take forever. Waveform models have larger errors but can be computed cheaply, which means they can be used in the real world and compared with data. Surrogates … Continue reading
February 4, 2019
The prospect of multiband gravitational-wave astronomy is so so so exciting (I mean, really!). So exciting that we want to make sure once again it’s true; and this is today’s paper. Multiband means seeing the same black hole binary with … Continue reading
November 15, 2018
As you can imagine, I’m kind of obsessed with black hole binaries. So easy (let’s face it, a black hole is easy! Just mass and spin), but at the same time so terribly complicated… Happy to present our attempt to … Continue reading
November 14, 2018
Latest in the series of our spin-precession papers, here we found a thing that was worthy of a new name: wide nutation (we had wide precession before, but this is better). These are black-hole binary configurations where the angle between any … Continue reading
September 24, 2018
Black hole mergers are like a scattering problem. Two black holes come in, and one black hole comes out. The difference is a bunch of gravitational waves. Those are nice, of course, but the remnant black hole is important too! … Continue reading
September 13, 2018
We all know Doppler shifts, right? That’s like the biibouuubiiiiboouuuuuu of an ambulance. That happens to gravitational waves as well. Suppose you have a merging binary which is emitting gravitational waves (bibooou). If that binary is going somewhere (say it’s … Continue reading
August 7, 2018
Today’s paper celebrates the wedding of startrack and precession (the nickname for this project was pretrack 😉 ). We use population synthesis evolution from startrack to predict the parameters of spinning black-hole binaries observed by LIGO. The spin distribution is … Continue reading
June 29, 2018
LISA is going to be amazing: supermassive black-holes, galactic white dwarfs, EMRIs… Besides all of that, LISA can help us doing LIGO’s science better. Some LIGO sources (notably, things like GW150914) will show up in LISA years in advance. LISA … Continue reading
June 21, 2018
Gravitational-wave astronomy is moving. Quickly. In a few years we are going to have large catalogs of many detections, and a whole lot of information to extract from them. Instead of focussing on parameters (masses, spins, redshifts) of single sources, … Continue reading
June 13, 2018
This is a massive review born out of the European COST Action CA16104 Gravitational waves, black holes and fundamental physics (GWverse). We summarize the status of the field of gravitational-wave astronomy and lie down a roadmap for the immediate future. Leor … Continue reading
May 4, 2018
LIGO can measure spins. Well, effective spins actually. These are special combinations of the two spins (magnitude and direction) and the binary mass ratio. There’s a ton of astrophysics that can be done just with this quantity, but one should … Continue reading
February 12, 2018
Surrogate models are fancy interpolation schemes developed to provide accurate (well, really accurate) waveforms directly from numerical relativity simulations. The first surrogate able to model fully precessing systems came up recently (and it’s really an amazing work!). Here we exploit … Continue reading
September 6, 2017
Natal kicks imparted to neutron stars and black holes at birth can be constrained using LIGO data. Kicks cause misalignments between the spins and the orbital angular momentum. Here we compare large banks of population synthesis simulations to LIGO data … Continue reading
August 11, 2017
Supernova can be used to test gravity! …and if there’s a massive scalar field around, things get terribly interesting. Here we generalize arXiv:1602.06952 to study stellar collapse in massive scalar-tensor theories of gravity (that is, the graviton is coupled to a … Continue reading
July 14, 2017
Bayesian statistics is really cool. It lets you specify clearly and openly all the assumptions that enter an analysis. What’s the effect of these prior assumptions on current inference with gravitational-wave data from black-hole binaries? Here we tackle this question … Continue reading
June 21, 2017
Looks like some of the LIGO black holes have low spins (better, low effective spins). In this paper we show these values can be accommodated with standard “field binaries”, i.e. formation channels where binary black holes form from binary stars. … Continue reading
May 5, 2017
Part of our series of spin precession papers, here we study nutational resonances. Those are configurations where the precession of L about J, and that of the two spins are in resonance with each other. These configurations are very generic … Continue reading
April 12, 2017
Black-hole data can be used to probe the lives of stars. That’s the promise of gravitational-wave astronomy, right? Here we give it a go. We present a (admittedly) very simple model showing that the misalignment of GW151226 can be easily … Continue reading
March 18, 2017
What if the black holes LIGO sees are the results of a merger? I mean, we see mergers, but maybe those are second-generation ones, and the two merging black holes come from first-generation mergers. Or (more likely…) stellar mass black … Continue reading
December 16, 2016
Equal-mass binaries correspond to a discontinuous limit in the spin precession equations. A new constant of motion pops up, which can be exploited to study the dynamics. This is a really neat calculation done with Jakub, a Cambridge undergraduate student. Also, … Continue reading
June 14, 2016
Black hole kicks are cool: powerful (up to thousands of km/s!) recoils that black holes receive following a merger. Here we show these events might leave an imprint on the emitted gravitational waves, which is potentially detectable by future interferometers. … Continue reading
May 3, 2016
Here we present my numerical code precession, which implements our multi-timescale way to look at spinning black-hole binaries. The paper has a detailed description of the various functions as well as lots of examples. Update: typos in Eq. (36-37) have been … Continue reading
February 22, 2016
Here we present 1+1 numerical-relativity simulation of stellar collapse in scalar-tensor theories, where gravity is mediated by the usual metric coupled to an additional scalar field. Bottom line: you can test General Relativity with supernovae explosions! Davide Gerosa, Ulrich Sperhake, Christian D. … Continue reading
July 20, 2015
This is a follow up of arXiv:1403.7147, just done better. Instead of overlaps, we do real injections in LIGO parameter-estimation codes to show that spin-orbit resonances are indeed detectable. Daniele Trifirò, Richard O’Shaughnessy, Davide Gerosa, Emanuele Berti, Michael Kesden, Tyson Littenberg, Ulrich … Continue reading
June 30, 2015
Here we study the stability of black-hole binaries with spins (anti)aligned with the orbital angular momentum. Aligned configurations are points of equilibrium, but are they stable? If the heavier black-hole is aligned and the lighter one is anti-aligned, this turns … Continue reading
June 10, 2015
Detailed analysis of 2PN black-hole binary spin precession using multi-timescale methods. Follow-up of the Letter arXiv:1411.0674, this paper contains the full calculation and the description of the underlying phenomenology. Davide Gerosa, Michael Kesden, Ulrich Sperhake, Emanuele Berti, Richard O’Shaughnessy.Physical Review … Continue reading
May 27, 2015
What happens if you throw a scalar field into General Relativity? And if you throw more than one? Here is a paper on the phenomenology of neutron stars in theories with more than one scalar field coupled to gravity. Michael … 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
January 28, 2015
A massive review on testing gravity, which came out of a nice meeting we had at University of Mississippi in January 2014. See the numbers. Emanuele Berti, et al. (53 authors incl. Davide Gerosa).Classical and Quantum Gravity 32 (2015) 24, 243001.arXiv:1501.07274 [gr-qc].
November 3, 2014
2PN black-hole binary spin precession works exactly like Kepler’s two-body problem. Not kidding: just define effective potentials and divide the phase space into morphologies. The only things you need are a few timescales to play with. Michael Kesden, Davide Gerosa, … 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
March 27, 2014
Spinning black-hole binaries might belong to two spin-orbit resonances, or families. Can you tell them apart using gravitational-wave observations? Spoiler: yes! Bonus note: check out the title in v1 on the arxiv… Davide Gerosa, Richard O’Shaughnessy, Michael Kesden, Emanuele Berti, … Continue reading