Dr Thomas Spieksma has been awarded the Instrument Centre for Danish Astrophysics (IDA) PhD Prize; the prize is awarded annually to the most scientifically outstanding PhD thesis defended at a Danish university within the fields of astronomy and astrophysics.
Dr Spieksma’s thesis, entitled ‘Exploring black hole environments’, investigates how astrophysical environments, such as plasma, dark-matter structures, and clouds of ultralight bosons, affect black holes and their gravitational-wave signatures. The past decade has transformed the ability to observe the Universe. Via gravitational waves, merging black holes and neutron stars can now be directly detected, offering unprecedented opportunities to test General Relativity and explore astrophysics in a new way. Driven by this breakthrough, the next generation of detectors is being developed to observe a wider range of sources with greater precision, ushering in a new era in gravitational-wave astronomy: leveraging black holes as probes of new physics.
‘One of the exciting things about gravitational-wave astronomy is that black holes are no longer only objects we observe, but also tools we can use to probe new physics,’ comments Dr Spieksma. ‘My thesis examined how different environments around black holes can affect the gravitational-wave signals we hope to observe with future detectors. This required improving the modelling of the environments themselves, as well as developing a new theoretical framework to include them in the fully relativistic regime where these binaries reside. The work showed that environments do not affect binary black hole systems only through a simple dephasing of the gravitational waveform. They can also leave characteristic imprints and produce non-trivial, sometimes unexpected effects on the orbital orientation of the binary. This opens a new avenue for using gravitational waves to search for new fundamental and astrophysics.’