K. E. Saavik Ford

American Museum of Natural History, Dept. of Astrophysics, September 26, 12:30 pm

The AGN Channel for Stellar Mass Binary Black Hole Mergers

Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) have historically been studied and understood strictly as gas disks accreting onto supermassive black holes. However, we now understand that there are ‘things’ in AGN accretion disks-specifically stars and stellar mass black holes. Based on our understanding of the physics of ‘things in disks’ (largely derived for protoplanetary systems), we can predict the detectable signatures of these ‘things’, including binary black hole (BBH) mergers (detectable via gravitational waves-GW), tidal disruption events (TDEs), changing look AGN (CL-AGN) and quasi-periodic eruptions (QPEs), among others. Understanding the signatures of ‘things in disks’ will enable us to reverse engineer the parameters of both AGN disks and nuclear star clusters (NSCs) as a function of redshift. This is especially valuable for NSCs, which are usually poorly observationally constrained at redshifts other than zero. Looking ahead, we will see that ‘things’ in AGN disks are especially important for our understanding of Rubin and LISA observations, both of which will produce haystacks of data requiring careful searches for shiny, but possibly sharp, needles.