Stellar black hole formation and detection
Monday 24th - Friday 28th of March, 2025
Panasonic Auditorium, Yukawa Hall, YITP
The 2020s are proving to be an exceptionally fruitful era for detecting black holes that formed from stars. Binary black hole mergers in distant galaxies have been detected in gravitational waves by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) network since 2015. Now in 2024, this sample constitutes over 100 merger events, with several challenging some basic predictions from stellar evolution theory. Moreover, since recent releases from the Gaia space observatory, it has been possible to find a handful of black holes in binaries with evolved stars in our very own Milky Way Galaxy optically. This is in addition to black holes in shorter period, interacting binaries observed with e.g. X-ray.
New constraints on stellar black hole formation can test theories in particle physics, cosmology, quantum mechanics and nuclear physics. It is therefore of paramount importance to clarify what black hole astrophysics theories are currently uncertain and which are robust in this exciting era of stellar black hole observations. This workshop can help contribute to progress on understanding black hole formation and its various applications.
Lucy McNeill (RIKEN iTHEMS, Kyoto University)
Kunihito Ioka (YITP)
Masaru Shibata (YITP, MPI/AEI)
Keiichi Maeda (Kyoto University)
Katelyn Breivik (Carnegie Mellon University)
Adelle Goodwin (ICRAR/ Curtin University)
Ryosuke Hirai (RIKEN/ Monash University)
Takashi Moriya (NAOJ)
