Johan Samsing recieves 2025 MERAC Prize

Johan Samsing receives this year's MERAC prize, which is awarded by the European Astronomical Society, for his pioneering work on ways to probe the origin of binary black hole mergers in the new era of observational gravitational wave astrophysics. In particular, he was the first to derive how binary black hole mergers with observable eccentricity naturally form in dense stellar systems, which are now one of the most reliable ways of helping probe the formation site and environment of black holes in our universe. He performed the first controlled relativistic black hole scatterings, and developed innovative theoretical methods to analytically derive the probability for black hole collisions in the many chaotic interactions that are known to take place in stellar systems. His work has major implications for the coming decades of gravitational wave astrophysics, where larger number of mergers, higher sensitivity, and multi-gravitational wave band coverage, will provide insight into the distribution and role of black holes throughout cosmic time. Johan Samsing currently leads the Gravitational Wave Astrophysics group with support from a Villum Young Investigator Grant and an ERC starting Grant. The MERAC Prize is awarded by the European Astronomical Society and you can read more about the award on the MERAC Foundation's homepage  https://www.merac.org/merac-prize?view=article&id=69&catid=24