There is a supermassive black hole inside every galaxy, in particular, at the centre of the galaxies, also known as the active galactic nucleus (AGN). Surrounding many of these giants are accretion disks, where stellar-mass black holes can form. These smaller black holes can then merge and create ripples of spacetime, known as gravitational waves…
Category: Blog
A New Approach to Cosmology with Gravitational Waves
Gravitational waves (GWs) have transformed our ability to probe the Universe, opening a new window for studying cosmology. Among their exciting applications is using them as “standard sirens” to measure the Hubble constant, H0, a critical parameter in understanding the Universe’s expansion. The discovery of the Hubble tension—a discrepancy between local and early-Universe measurements of H0—has driven…
A little guide to PhD/postdoc applications
Hereafter, I put together a quick list of resources, tips & tricks, and thoughts on the PhD/postdoc search process. Some things are ideas, but are not necessarily solidly grounded. Take the following as a starting guide, and adopt the approach you think is best for you. Most of the time, an application consists in finding…
Is GW230529 lensed?
In May 2023, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration’s fourth observing run brought about an exciting discovery: the mass-gap event GW230529. A mass-gap event happens when one, or both, of the objects in the gravitational wave-emitting binary falls between the upper limit of mass for a neutron star (roughly three solar masses), and the lower limit of mass…
Our new paper about gravitational wave based lens reconstruction is now online!
Since the gravitational lensing of light was first observed around one hundred years ago, it has became and developed into a standard, mature tool in studying astrophysics and cosmology, for instance, studying the structure of the (lens) galaxy and measuring Hubble constant. In many of these applications, lens reconstruction/modelling is a crucial and necessary middle…