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NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Noble; simulation data, d'Ascoli et al. 2018

The Ongoing Hunt for Supermassive Black Hole Binaries

Event Type
Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor
Department of Astronomy
Location
134 Astronomy Building
Virtual
Join online
Date
Oct 21, 2025   3:45 - 4:45 pm  
Speaker
Professor Jessie Runnoe
Contact
Daniel Franco
E-Mail
danielf9@illinois.edu
Phone
217-300-6769
Originating Calendar
Astronomy Colloquium Speaker Calendar

Supermassive black hole binaries are thought to be an inevitable product of the prevailing galaxy evolution scenarios where most massive galaxies host a central black hole and undergo mergers over cosmic time. The early stages of this process have been observed in the form of interacting galaxy pairs and widely separated dual quasars, but the close, gravitationally bound binaries that are expected to follow have proven elusive. The detection of this population is important because at the smallest separations they become bright sources of low-frequency gravitational waves and are prime targets for multi-messenger detections with pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) and the upcoming Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). In this talk, I will discuss observational signatures of close binary supermassive black holes, especially in the context of regular quasar variability, and ongoing work towards multi-messenger detections with telescopes and gravitational wave detectors.

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