Physical Society Colloquium

Massive black hole binaries in the cosmos

Marta Volonteri

Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris

Massive black holes weighing from a few tens of thousands to billions of solar masses and above inhabit the centers of today?s galaxies, including our own Milky Way. Massive black holes also shone as quasars in the past, with the earliest detected a mere billion years after the Big Bang. Along cosmic time, encounters between galaxies hosting massive black holes in their centers are expected to have produced binary massive black holes that eventually coalesced by emission of gravitational waves. I will discuss the physical processes through which massive black holes pair and bind, and how we can use gravitational wave observations to constrain the evolving population of massive black holes.