Inquiring Minds @ Tech Public Lecture Series: Tamara Bogdanovic, Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Physics

Galaxy collisions and mergers are a common consequence of the structure formation in the universe. We know that they happen because we see a number of beautiful examples on the sky through the "eyes" of many astronomical observatories. It is also thought that almost every galaxy (including our own, the Milky Way) harbors a supermassive black hole at its center. I will discuss the "knowns" and "unknowns" in the evolution of supermassive black hole pairs that form in collisions of their host galaxies and end their cosmic journey when the two black holes merge due to the emission of gravitational waves.