The NANOGrav Experiment
Speaker
Date
Time
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Online
Abstract
Galaxy mergers are a standard aspect of galaxy formation and evolution, and most large galaxies contain supermassive black holes. As part of the merging process, the supermassive black holes should in-spiral together and eventually merge, generating a background of gravitational radiation in the nanohertz to microhertz regime. An array of precisely timed pulsars spread across the sky can form a galactic-scale gravitational wave detector in the nanohertz band. I describe the current efforts to develop and extend the pulsar timing array concept, together with recent evidence for a gravitational wave background, and efforts to constrain astrophysical phenomena at the heart of supermassive black hole mergers.
Biography
Prof. Chiara Mingarelli is a gravitational-wave astrophysicist based at Yale University, and a guest researcher at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics. Her core research is focused on using Pulsar Timing Arrays to detect low-frequency gravitational waves, with forays into electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational-wave events, such as fast radio bursts.
