Andrea Derdzinski

Vanderbilt University, April 25, 12:00 pm

Signatures of gas in milli-Hertz gravitational waves

The gas-rich environments in active galactic nuclei can influence the dynamical evolution of black holes and stellar objects as they interact with the accretion disk surrounding the supermassive black hole. Disk-mediated processes can produce gas-embedded gravitational wave (GW) sources across a range of frequencies, including massive black hole binaries and extreme mass ratio inspirals.  While these sources emit GWs detectable by space-based detectors, their interaction with surrounding gas can imprint itself on the GW signal. How common should these sources be, and (why) should we care?  I will discuss what we know and what we need to figure out.