Research report 2009 - Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics

Listening to the Universe with gravitational waves

Authors
Amaro Seoane, Pau
Departments

Astrophysikalische Relativitätstheorie (Prof. Dr. Bernard Schutz)
MPI für Gravitationsphysik, Golm

Summary
Nowadays it is well-established that in the centre of the Milky Way a massive black hole (MBH) with a mass of about four million solar masses is lurking. While we start to have a defined picture about the origin and growth of supermassive black holes, MBHs with smaller masses such as the one in our galactic centre remain an understudied enigma. The key to understanding these holes, and how some of them grow by orders of magnitude in mass, is to understand the dynamics of the stars in the galactic neighbourhood.

For the full text, see the German version.

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