Big Capturing Small

Pau Amaro-Seoane
2018-04-26 16:00-17:00
N109

One of the most interesting sources of gravitational waves is the inspiral of
compact objects on to a massive black hole (MBH), commonly referred to as an
extreme-mass ratio inspiral. The small object, typically a stellar black hole,
emits significant amounts of GW along each orbit in the detector bandwidth. In
this talk I will summarize the science that we can do with these gravitational
waves. In particular, I will review the gravitational capture of compact objects by
supermassive black holes, but will focus on intermediate-mass black holes, in
globular clusters. The velocity dispersion of these clusters is low enough to
allow the merged system to escape the host cluster. I will present numerical
simulations of this situation.