Future space missions like LISA will listen to gravitational waves from some of the most extreme events in the universe: Extreme Mass-Ratio Inspirals (EMRIs). These are systems where a stellar mass black hole spirals into a supermassive one while emitting low frequency graviational waves

New paper on the arXiv today about systematic errors when modelling the gravitation waveform from extreme mass ratio inspirals and their impact on LISA data science

Huge thanks to my collaborators, especially Hassan Khalvati, for getting this project over the line! 🧪⚛️🔭🧮

arxiv.org/abs/2509.08875

That's right. Current ground based detectors (LIGO-Virgo-Kagra) are sensitive to the higher frequency part of stellar mass black hole mergers, which consist of the late inspiral, merger and ringdown. We need spaced based detectors like LISA to see lower frequency signals like EMRIs

But we'll be able to measure these signals with the upcoming European Space Agency's LISA mission. If we can model these signals accurately, we can learn a lot about supermassive black holes and their environments and put Einstein's Theory of General Relativity through it's toughest test yet

I model the gravitational waves that come from binary black holes where one is a supermassive black hole and the other is a much smaller (but still pretty huge) stellar mass black hole, known as Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals. As you can see, these things get pretty complicated 🧪⚛️🎢🔭🧮

Last week, Ollie Burke and I put out a note describing how to convert between all the different orbital phases used to describe orbits around a spinning black hole. The most fun reason to do this is. to help make visualisations like this one
arxiv.org/abs/2411.04955