So much has happened!
NANOGrav and other PTAs found evidence for the gravitational wave background!
It has been over a year since posting a news item, but it has been a busy year. I will do bullet points of the most important stuff that has happened.
- Cayenne Matt and CJ Harris advanced to candidacy! Congratulations to them both!
- Cayenne published Matt, Gültekin, & Simon (2023)! Congratulations to them! “The impact of black hole scaling relation assumptions on the mass density of black holes” shows how at high redshift, the M–Mbulge and M–σ relations make different predictions about the population of largest black holes and that the difference may explain the gravitational wave background.
- Kevin Whitley published Whitley et al. (2024)! Congratulations to him! “Shock-driven periodic variability in a low-mass-ratio supermassive black hole binary” It’s a fascinating look into the periodicity that can be driven by supermassive black hole binary system.
- CJ published Harris & Gültekin (2024)! Congratulations to them! “Connecting core galaxy properties to the massive black hole binary population” is a novel look at how we can use observations of galaxy stellar cores to infer properties of the population of binary supermassive black holes.
- Marianne Vestergaard and I published the chapter “Massive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei: Observations” in The Encyclopedia of Cosmology. We did our best to summarize everything in 77 pages. It’s also available on arXiv.
- Oh, and NANOGrav found evidence for a gravitational wave background!
The evidence for gravitational wave background is huge news. It was a huge effort to get there from a team I have loved being a part of. I played significant roles in the “Astro Interpretation” paper and the “Evidence” paper.