Luciano Combi is an astrophysicist interested in gravitation, compact objects, high-energy astrophysics, and foundations of science. He is currently working on understanding how plasma behaves around compact sources such as black holes and neutron stars, and what sort of electromagnetic emission these systems produce.
Luciano is doing his first postdoc at Perimeter Institute with a joint appointment as a CITA National Fellow (U of Guelph). He completed his PhD as a CONICET fellow in Argentina at the Argentine Institute of Radioastronomy, La Plata.
Title: A surge of light from supermassive black hole mergers.
Abstract: We have good evidence that most massive galaxies harbour a gigantic black hole in their center and we also know that galaxies merge; what happens then with these supermassive black holes after they merge? If they can form a close binary during this process, efficient emission of gravitational waves will make them inspiral and eventually coalesce. Because they are likely to be in a gas-rich environment, similar to active galactic nuclei, this gravitational wave signal would be accompanied by copious amounts of electromagnetic radiation. In talk, I will present recent advances in theoretical models of accretion flows onto supermassive binary black holes and how to use magnetohydrodynamical simulation to find them.