108 - Chiara Mingarelli: Supermassive Black Holes & the Gravitational Wave Background

Chiara Mingarelli is a gravitational-wave astrophysicist and a professor in the Department of Physics at Yale University. She studies supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies and their mergers using data about gravitational waves that are detected by pulsar timing array experiments. In this episode, Robinson and Chiara discuss PTAs, gravitational waves, black holes, how and why they merge, and the fresh release of NANOgrav’s fifteen-year data set, which gives the first ever evidence of a gravitational wave background in the universe, an unprecedented discovery that marks the dawn of a new era of astrophysical research. Chiara’s Website: https://www.chiaramingarelli.com/ Chiara’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/Dr_CMingarelli OUTLINE 00:00 In This Episode... 00:30 Introduction 02:58 Chiara’s Interest in Black Holes 10:25 What Are Gravitational Waves 15:47 Detecting Gravitational Waves 31:39 How to Visualize Black Holes 40:55 Black Holes and Gravitational Waves 48:51 Two Different Backgrounds 53:46 Collecting and Interpreting Data 56:36 Why Do Black Holes Anchor Galaxies? 58:34 Why Do Black Holes Form Binaries? 01:04:25 Lingering Questions 01:11:33 Cosmic Strings 01:17:35 NANOgrav’s Data Release and the Gravitational Wave Background Robinson’s Website: http://robinsonerhardt.com Robinson Erhardt researches symbolic logic and the foundations of mathematics at Stanford University. Join him in conversations with philosophers, scientists, weightlifters, artists, and everyone in-between.