With collaborators Carlos Palenzuela and Steve Liebling, Prof. Luis Lehner discovered by numerical simulations that merging supermassive black holes can give rise to powerful emissions of plasma collimated into a single jet. This single jet is the result of the merger of the individual jets attached to each black hole, which merge together as the black holes merge. This effect has clear observational consequences, and will permit the precise localization of the system which hosts the merging black holes. This system will be the source of both gravitational and electromagnetic radiation, which will be detected simultaneously.
This work was published in the prestigious journal Science [1], and featured on the following websites: