Do we expect to detect electromagnetic radiation from merging stellarmass black hole binaries like GW150914?

by Shuang-Nan Zhang (Institute of High-energy physics, Bejing, China)

Wednesday 25 May 2016, 16:00 → 18:00 Europe/Rome

Aula Conversi (Dipartimento di Fisica - Ed. G. Marconi)

> We study whether electromagnetic radiation can be detected from merging stellar mass black hole (BH) binaries like GW150914, > byinvestigating the possible growth and merging processes of the two stellar mass BHs in the merging event of GW150914 > detected by LIGO, as clocked by a distant external observer. Our main results are: (1) The description of the BH growth using > stationary metric of a pre-existing BH predicts strong electromagnetic radiation from merging BHs, which is inconsistent with > GW150914; (2) Only gravitational wave radiation can be produced in the coalescence of two BHs, if the BH growth is described > using time-dependent metric considering the influence of the in-falling matter onto a pre-existing BH. Future high sensitivity > detections of gravitational waves from merging BHs might be used to probe matter distribution and space-time geometry in the > vicinity of the horizon. >