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October 23 (4:00PM) in the 2nd Floor Conference Room in Dearborn Speaker: Dr. Tal Alexander (Weizmann Institute, Israel) “The Galactic Center as a laboratory for the dynamics of extreme mass ratio gravitational wave sources” Gravitational waves from compact remnants that inspiral into a central massive black hole (Extreme Mass Ratio Inspiral events: EMRIs) are one of the three main target classes for the planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) space mission (the other two are comparable mass targets: coalescing massive black hole or stellar black hole binaries). The extreme mass ratio implies simple relativistic physics and interpretation, but also a weak, hard to detect signal. Different predictions of the cosmic EMRI rate and orbital characteristics vary drastically. It is not even clear that the dominant dynamical mechanism has been correctly identified yet. I will describe the inspiral problem and report new theoretical results on the effects of resonant relaxation and massive perturbers on EMRIs. I will discuss how observations of stars in the Galactic Center can be used to directly test these ideas. |