School Of Physics Fall Colloquium Series-Dr. Jessie Runnoe

Speaker: Jessie Runnoe (Vanderbilt)

Bio: Jessie Runnoe is an assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University. She is a graduate of Whitman College, received her PhD in physics from the University of Wyoming in 2013, and held postdoctoral research positions at Penn State and the University of Michigan. Her research is focused on growing supermassive black holes, which we view as quasars. To do this work, she uses space telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and big-data surveys of large areas of the sky (including time-domain surveys, which show a movie of the sky instead of a single image) taken with ground-based optical telescopes. In her free time, she is an avid cyclist and ascribes to the belief that the correct number of bikes to own is N+1, where N is the number of bikes you currently own.

Title: Electromagnetic and multi-messenger searches for supermassive black hole binaries

Abstract: Supermassive black hole binaries are thought to be an inevitable product of the prevailing galaxy evolution scenarios where most massive galaxies host a central black hole and undergo mergers over cosmic time. The early stages of this process have been observed in the form of interacting galaxy pairs and widely separated dual quasars, but the close, gravitationally bound binaries that are expected to follow have proven elusive. The detection of this population is important because at the smallest separations they become bright sources of low-frequency gravitational waves and are prime targets for multi-messenger detections with pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) and the upcoming Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). In this talk, I will discuss observational signatures of binary supermassive black holes and prospects for multi-messenger detections with electromagnetic facilities and gravitational wave detectors.