Project at AIAS

The recent detections of gravitational waves (GWs) from merging binary black holes (BHs) and neutron stars (NSs) have opened a new major branch of research in modern astrophysics and fundamental physics. It is anticipated that the two American GW detectors (LIGO), combined with their European sister (Virgo), reach full design sensitivity within the next few years, leading to detections of up tovhundreds of such GW events each year from merging binaries of BHs and/or NSs invthe local Universe. However, the central questions concerning their origin still remain unanswered. In this AIAS project, I aim to investigate key aspects of how these BH/NS binaries form using a combination of numerical binary stellar evolution, supernova explosion modelling and population synthesis investigations. Besides the existence of these extragalactic transient high-frequency GW events, however, GWs are also emitted as continuum sources at lower frequencies from tight Galactic systems of BHs, NSs or white dwarfs (WDs) up to millions of years before these compact objects finally merge with one another. The origin of these systems will also be explored.

Short bio

Thomas Tauris is a theoretical astrophysicist working on a broad range of topics, including: formation and evolution of compact objects (black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs), pulsars, binary star interactions, gravitational waves, supernovae, hypervelocity stars etc. He has previously worked in Sydney, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Bonn. He is a reviewer for Physical Review Letters, Nature and many other journals and was appointed honorary professor at Aarhus University in 2016.