Colloquium – Jessie Runnoe

Jessie Runnoe, Vanderbilt University

Quasars at the intersection of multi-messenger and time-domain astronomy

Recent evidence for a low-frequency gravitational wave background attributable to a cosmological population of supermassive black hole binaries opens the frontier of multi-messenger astrophysics to most massive black holes in the Universe. In this context, the combination of gravitational wave and electromagnetic observations will be a powerful method for understanding the co-evolution of black holes and their host galaxies, and for revealing the uncertain evolution of binaries themselves. However, in the multi-messenger ecosystem, electromagnetic signatures of binaries are complicated by normal quasar variability. As a result, understanding and implementing quasar variability with current and future time-domain surveys has the power to be transformative. In this talk, I will describe efforts to advance our understanding of individual quasar variability in electromagnetic surveys and use this as a foundation to plan future multi-messenger detections of binaries

Bio: Jessie Runnoe is an assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University. She is a graduate of Whitman College, received her PhD in physics from the University of Wyoming in 2013, and held postdoctoral research positions at Penn State and the University of Michigan. Her research is focused on growing supermassive black holes, which we view as quasars. To do this work, she uses space telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and big-data surveys of large areas of the sky (including time-domain surveys, which show a movie of the sky instead of a single image) taken with ground-based optical telescopes. In her free time, she is an avid cyclist and ascribes to the belief that the correct number of bikes to own is N+1, where N is the number of bikes you currently own.

August 28, 2025 @ 3:10pm (CST) in 4327 Stevenson Center; light refreshments available at 2:50 PM

Host: S Taylor