Gravity seminar - Uli Sperhake Seminar

Black holes play a vital role in many astrophysical processes and are also one of the strongest candidates for the generation of gravitational waves to be detected with ground based detectors and future space detectors. Here we discuss how the inspiral of black-hole binaries is affected by the spin-orbit resonances discovered by Schnittman in 2004. These resonances have the capacity of aligning or antialigning the individual holes' spins and the orbital angular momentum depending on the spin orientations at large separations. Specifically, we discuss how these alignment effects can significantly suppress so-called superkicks generated in the merger of supermassive black holes, and how the resonance alignments might provide us with an observational signature in gravitational wave observations of stellar-mass black holes capable of discriminating between different binary formation scenarios.