Featured Article: Identifying Supermassive Black Hole Recoil
When two supermassive black holes (SMBHs) coalesce during a merger of galaxies, general relativistic effects impart a ‘recoil velocity’ to the remnant SMBH, which can expel the SMBH to large, kiloparsec-scale distances. We run numerical simulations of merging massive elliptical galaxies, testing a number of recoil velocities, and use Bayesian hierarchical inference to determine how the stellar mass reacts to the recoiling SMBH. We additionally detect a kinematic signature, brought about by non angular momentum-conserving stellar orbits, which can uniquely constrain how much stellar mass was lost from the centre before the recoil velocity occurred, allowing us to infer the corresponding recoil velocity. The full details of the study can be found in the article Identifying supermassive black hole recoil in elliptical galaxies.
Featured Article: Binary Eccentricity is Stochastic
Computer simulations of galaxy mergers are affected by the discretisation of the phase space: the exact positions and velocities of particles will influence the orbital dynamics of the supermassive black holes in the system. Increasing the number of particles used to represent the galaxy merger reduces the uncertainty in the impact parameter of the two SMBHs, but this does not necessarily translate to a convergence in the SMBH eccentricity. The full details of the study can be found in the article Reviving stochasticity: uncertainty in SMBH binary eccentricity is unavoidable.
Featured Article: Spin Ellipticity Tracks
The advent of integral field unit spectroscopy allows us to combine both morphological and kinematic data of galaxies. By studying how the ellipticity and spin parameter vary with radius, different galaxy types can be revealed that would not necessarily be distinguishable with just photometry or kinematics alone. The full details of the study can be found in the article The SAMI Galaxy Survey: rules of behaviour for spin-ellipticity radial tracks in galaxies.
All Publications
I have been involved in a number of publications, both as a first and a contributing author. All refereed scientific publications I have been involved with can be found here.
