GW1 - Sources of Gravitational Waves |
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Speaker |
Mandel, Ilya |
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| Talk Title |
Searching for Intermediate Mass Black Holes through Gravitational-wave Observations |
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Abstract |
Intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs) weighing in at a few hundred solar masses may be generic in a both modern globular clusters and in the early Universe as seeds of today's massive black holes. However, they are extremely difficult to observe through standard methods. In this talk, I briefly review possible IMBH formation channels and existing observational evidence, and focus on the possibility of detecting IMBHs through gravitational-wave signals of IMBH binary mergers or inspirals of stellar-mass compact objects into IMBHs. I highlight the ability to extract information about IMBHs through such observations, as well as the potential to use them as probes of structure formation, dynamics, and strong-field general relativity. I end by speculating on the possible contribution of very massive stars in the low-redshift Universe to the merging IMBH population. |
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