Gravity and astrophysics at UMiss

The paper Are merging black holes born from stellar collapse or previous mergers? by Davide Gerosa and Emanuele Berti was published today in Physical Review D and selected as an Editors’ Suggestion. Ars Technica has a write-up on our paper.
From the abstract:

Advanced LIGO detectors at Hanford and Livingston made two confirmed and one marginal detection of binary black holes during their first observing run. The first event, GW150914, was from the merger of two black holes much heavier that those whose masses have been estimated so far, indicating a formation scenario that might differ from “ordinary” stellar evolution. One possibility is that these heavy black holes resulted from a previous merger. When the progenitors of a black hole binary merger result from previous mergers, they should (on average) merge later, be more massive, and have spin magnitudes clustered around a dimensionless spin ∼0.7. Here we ask the following question: can gravitational-wave observations determine whether merging black holes were born from the collapse of massive stars (“first generation”), rather than being the end product of earlier mergers (“second generation”)? We construct simple, observationally motivated populations of black hole binaries, and we use Bayesian model selection to show that measurements of the masses, luminosity distance (or redshift), and “effective spin” of black hole binaries can indeed distinguish between these different formation scenarios.

Every year the Gravitational Wave International Committee (GWIC) awards two thesis prizes: the GWIC Thesis Prize and the Stefano Braccini Thesis Prize.

Our collaborator (and former Master student at Ole Miss) Davide Gerosa won the 2016 Stefano Braccini Thesis Prize for theoretical work on gravitational wave sources. Davide, who is now an Einstein Fellow at the California Institute of Technology, defended his Ph.D. thesis (Source modelling at the dawn of gravitational-wave astronomy, available for download here) at the University of Cambridge. His advisor was Ulrich Sperhake (also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Mississippi).

From the announcement:

GWIC is pleased to announce that the selection committee for the GWIC Thesis Prize and the Stefano Braccini Thesis Prize has reached a decision. This year, there was a total of 9 theses nominated, from 5 different countries.

The 2016 Stefano Braccini Thesis Prize is awarded to Davide Gerosa for his thesis “Source modelling at the dawn of gravitational-wave astronomy”. Dr. Gerosa received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and was nominated by his adviser, Prof. Ulrich Sperhake. Dr. Gerosa’s thesis includes a wide variety of topics relevant to gravitational waves, as well as other topics in astrophysics: astrophysical explorations of accretion disks, analytically challenging work in mathematical relativity and post-Newtonian theory, and numerical relativity coding of supernova core-collapse in relativity and modified gravity.

Congratulations, Davide!

From His Majesty the King of Spain

Felipe R.

Scientists from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) have confirmed the detection of a third gravitational-wave signal from a pair of coalescing black holes. Read the story on news.olemiss.edu or Caltech’s press release. Check the LIGO website for details about this latest detection.