Is Einstein’s theory of gravity correct? If so, let’s take it to its most extreme. We dive into the strong-field regime during a black hole merger - the most extreme environments where gravity reigns supreme, to test the limits of Einstein’s gravity. We see how the event horizons evolve during a merger and how non-linear effects help to correlate these changes to gravitational waves that we can measure. We prove why these must be dominated by “quasi-normal modes” and how the non-linear effects will look like in them.
We take an analytical approach to calculate the non-linear solutions, especially near the event horizon and calculate these non-linearities and see how well they stand up to results from simulations and observations from LIGO (they do :))
We see how black holes form and evolve, what do merger events look like, what happens near the event horizon and how does research in this field look like. Basic background of general relativity and mathematical methods in physics is helpful but not needed.
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