IberiCos 2025

Session

Session 5 - Compact objects & Cosmology

Apr 15, 2025, 10:15 AM

Auditorium C.1

Conveners

Session 5 - Compact objects & Cosmology

• Session convener: Javier Rubio

8. Are supermassive black holes primordial?

Chris Byrnes

4/15/25, 10:15 AM

Talk

Black holes with masses between a million and a billion solar masses are seen in the centres of many galaxies, even at high redshift. Their origin remains unknown and hard to explain, raising the possibility that these black holes are primordial rather than astrophysical. I will discuss the motivation for this scenario and the difficulty in finding a working model of the early universe (e.g....

35. Implications of cosmologically coupled black holes for pulsar timing arrays

Marco Calza (University of Trento)

4/15/25, 10:30 AM

Talk

It has been argued that realistic models of (singularity-free) black holes (BHs) embedded within an expanding Universe are coupled to the large-scale cosmological dynamics, with striking consequences, including pure cosmological growth of BH masses. In this pilot study, we examine the consequences of this growth for the stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) produced by inspiraling...

37. Probing fundamental physics using compact astrophysical objects

Eleanna Kolonia (Perimeter Institute, University of Waterloo)

4/15/25, 10:45 AM

Talk

It is well known that alternative theories to the Standard Model allow and sometimes require fundamental constants, such as the fine-structure constant, α, to vary in spacetime. We demonstrate that one way to investigate these variations is through the Mass-Radius relation of compact astrophysical objects, which is inherently affected by α variations. We start by considering the model of a...