The Astrophysical Promise of Black Hole RingdownsConfirmed

by Harrison Siegel (Columbia University)

Thursday Jan 9, 2025, 1:00 p.m. → 2:30 p.m. America/Toronto

PI/4-400 - Space Room (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics)

The remnant of a binary black hole coalescence is a perturbed black hole, which equilibrates by emitting ringdown gravitational waves. These ringdown waves not only encode information in their frequencies about the spacetime structure of the remnant black hole metric, but also have imprints in their amplitudes of the progenitor black hole binary's properties. In this talk I will highlight recent results in black hole ringdown data analysis and new understanding of astrophysical ringdown amplitudes gleaned from numerical relativity simulations, and will then discuss how ringdown analyses may become a vital tool for making inferences of binary black hole properties - even in situations where the gravitational wave signal from the binary inspiral itself is never directly observed.