GW190521

GW190521: a BBH merger in an AGN?

This summer we hosted Phia Morton, a Bachelor student from the Oregon State University that, thanks to the Univerisity of Florida’s IREU program, spent June and July in Pisa as summer student. Phia investigated the hypothesis that the binary system that generated the gravitational signal GW190521, the most massive confidently observed so far, merged in the accretion disk of an AGN.

This hypothesis seems to be well supported by the available data: Phia’s results are reported in this paper, accepted for publication in PRD.