Cecilia Chirenti (UFABC / U. of Maryland)
Testing the nature of black holes with gravitational waves
LIGO started observing gravitational waves from the mergers of binary black holes in 2015. The increasing number of detected gravitational wave events (roughly 50 events reported so far) allows us to start probing their astrophysics and aspects of fundamental physics. In particular, gravitational waves provide direct information about the nature of spacetime and the existence of black holes, which facilitates tests of the very successful theory of General Relativity. In the final stage of a binary black hole merger, gravitational waves are emitted as quasinormal modes (damped sinusoids), whose spectrum is characterized by the properties of the remnant black hole. Black hole spectroscopy is the proposal to use the detection of two or more quasinormal modes to test the no-hair theorem. I will present the prospects for performing black hole spectroscopy with current and future gravitational wave detectors.
Zoom link will be sent to the astro@physics.illinois.edu mailing list. There will be an informal meet-and-greet with the speaker at 11:30am Central.
