Astro Seminar - Did LIGO Detect Dark Matter?

Simeon Bird (University of California - Riverside)

Oct 2, 2018 3:30 PM

Location: Bell Room, Rutherford Physics
Astro Seminar

Title: Did LIGO Detect Dark Matter?

Abstract: I will discuss the possibility that the black-hole binary detected by LIGO may be a signature of primordial black hole dark matter. If two BHs in a galactic halo pass sufficiently close, they radiate enough energy in gravitational waves to become gravitationally bound. Curiously, the expected merger rate from these objects overlaps with that predicted by LIGO. At this time constraints from lensing mean that primordial black holes cannot be all the dark matter, but they may still be a subdominant component. Depending on time, I may also talk about a new automated technique for generating a probabilistic catalogue of strong absorbers (DLAs) for a quasar hydrogen survey, using a trained Gaussian Process kernel to model the quasar.