Daniel D'Orazio receives Sapere Aude grant from Denmark's Independent Research Fund

Assistant Professor Daniel J D’Orazio has been awarded a Sapere Aude Starting Grant from Denmark's Independent Research Fund for his project titled “Unraveling Mysteries of Supermassive Black Hole Pairs: Searches meet Simulations.”

The project addresses the mergers of supermassive black holes in galaxy centers. While the yet undetected gravitational waves from such mergers are targeted by near future observatories, we have yet to fully understand their pathways to merger — specifically, the interaction of these pairs with their astrophysical environments remains uncertain. The project pairs a theoretical and simulation based approach to predicting populations of merging supermassives with searches in existing and upcoming observational data to constrain models and enable discovery of these elusive black hole pairs.

The grant of over 6 million dkk will allow Daniel to hire two post-doctoral researchers and a PhD-student who will work under his guidance over the next four years.