Daniel D’Orazio receives Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship

NBIA Assistant Professor Daniel J. D’Orazio has been awarded a two-year EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to work on the modelling of and searches for supermassive black hole binaries.

Supermassive black holes pair together at the centers of newly collided galaxies. If they eventually spiral towards one another and coalesce, they would contribute the strongest sources of gravitational waves in the universe, at frequencies which will be detectable in the near future. However, the steps between galaxy merger and black hole merger are still not understood, and while candidates exist, there is yet no definitive evidence for such supermassive binaries in the late stages of inspiral. The proposed work will carry out state-of-the-art numerical hydrodynamical calculations of the interaction of these binaries with gas expected to exist at the centers of binary harboring galaxies. Results of these calculations will be used to 1) improve theoretical predictions of binary populations and 2) characterize electromagnetic signatures of accreting supermassive black hole binaries with which to find these elusive pairs.