Light Shows from Supermassive Binary Black Hole Mergers

Pablo Laguna (Georgia Tech)

Coincident detections of electromagnetic and gravitational wave signatures from the merger of supermassive binary black holes are the next observational grand challenge. Such detections will provide a wealth of opportunities to study gravitational physics, accretion physics, and cosmology. Understanding the conditions under which coincidences of electromagnetic and gravitational wave signatures arise during supermassive black hole mergers is therefore of paramount importance, requiring multi-scale/physics computational modeling. I will given an overview of these numerical studies and in particular focus on our effort to model the merger of supermassive black hole binaries in the presence of gaseous environments.