Gravity and astrophysics at UMiss

Our paper Effective Potentials and Morphological Transitions for Binary Black Hole Spin Precession was published today in Physical Review Letters. The paper provides new analytical understanding of the dynamics of binary black hole systems: we found a new way to understand the precession of the black hole spins and of the orbital angular momentum, and we showed how binaries have phase transitions between different “precessional states”. Two follow-up papers are in preparation.

The lead author of this paper (Mike Kesden) just received a prestigious Sloan Fellowship, an award reserved to “the most promising scientific researchers working today”. Davide Gerosa (formerly a student at Ole Miss, now in Cambridge) won the best poster award at the conference Compact Objects as Astrophysical and Gravitational Probes for a poster based on this paper.

See articles on the Ole Miss website, UT Dallas website, University of Cambridge website, Science Daily, phys.org, Media INAF (in Italian), Astroblogs (in Dutch), RIA (in Russian), Daily News (India), Science World Report, Tech Times, SpaceRef, Space Daily, ECN, R&D, The Daily Galaxy…