Collaborative Research: The Impacts of Massive Black Hole Formation and Evolution Pathways on Gravitational Wave Sources

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This award is part of a collaborative project to understand how massive black holes form and grow in galaxies in the early universe. The team will use computer simulations of the birth and growth of galaxies in the early universe with different black hole formation models. They will then look for differences in the predicted gravitational wave events between models. They will also search through the simulations for expected optical events that would be associated with the growth of black holes and possible gravitational wave events.This collaborative project will look at three different black hole seeding mechanisms in cosmological simulations with galaxy formation models as in the IllustrisTNG simulations. These will be traced through hydrodynamical cosmological simulations to determine the astrophysical information that can be extracted from gravitational wave detection of merging massive black holes and electromagnetic observations of galaxies at high redshifts. The data from the simulations will be made public.This project advances the goals of the NSF Windows on the Universe Big Idea.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.