Stephen Taylor got a new NSF grant to build the most sophisticated Galaxy catalog ever for multimessenger host follow-up of supermassive black hole binaries found by NANOGrav.
Stephen Taylor got a new NSF grant to build the most sophisticated Galaxy catalog ever for multimessenger host follow-up of supermassive black hole binaries found by NANOGrav. Prof. Taylor describes the project:
— With the recent breakthrough evidence for a background of nanohertz-frequency gravitational waves, we now turn to the source. Where does it come from?
— The most likely answer is a cosmic population of pairs of the most massive black holes in the Universe, circling each other and sitting at the centers of truly huge galaxies.
— We will be developing new search techniques and methods, and building the most sophisticated look-up catalog ever to hunt for the host galaxies of gravitational-wave events found by NANOGrav.
— By combining our understanding of gravity and light, we paint a more complete portrait of the Universe on massive scales. This will inaugurate the field of multi-messenger astronomy for supermassive black holes.