This event was recorded on February 5, 2025 at Aspen Center for Physics during the 2025 Nick and Maggie DeWolf Public Lecture Series, in partnership with Aspen Public Radio.
Supermassive Black Holes are awesome! But do you know what’s even more awesome? Merging supermassive black holes! Black holes smashing together is one of the most powerful and weirdest phenomena in the universe, and astronomers want to measure where, when, and how often it happens. We can do this because when black holes merge they shake the universe a little bit, and emit gravitational waves. Because black holes merge all over the universe, these ripples in space-time are… everywhere. How can we not just detect them, but disentangle them? It turns out we can use the entire galaxy as a gravitational wave detector! We use the properties of pulsars, which are the spinning cores of dead stars located all around the Milky Way, to measure echoes of merging black holes across cosmic time. Using this technique to unravel the cosmic melody of black holes will help us learn all about galaxy and black hole evolution, and it’s also really awesome.
About Jillian Bellovary
Jillian Bellovary is an Associate Professor at the City University of New York - Queensborough Community College, a Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History, and the founder and director of the CUNY Masters in Astrophysics bridge program. She uses cosmological simulations to study black hole formation and evolution, focusing on predicting the detection of intermediate mass black holes with gravitational waves. Jillian is well known in the field for mentoring a small army of community college students, always asking about off-center black holes, and knitting during talks. In her free time she plays roller derby.