“Extended body effects and gravitational wave astronomy”
Born in 2015 with the first direct detection of gravitational waves emitted by a merging black hole binary, gravitational wave astronomy has since grown into a mature observational science. Hundreds of signals detected by ground-based interferometers have opened a new window onto the most extreme regions of the universe, probing strong-field gravity and dense matter in regimes inaccessible to any other messenger.
In this talk, I will present how extended body effects — proper rotation and deformations arising from tidal and centrifugal interactions — are encoded into the dynamics and waveforms of compact binary systems. These finite-size corrections, though subtle, carry unique information about the internal structure and nature of the compact objects involved: the spin of black holes and neutron stars, the equation of state of dense nuclear matter, and potential signatures of exotic compact objects. I will discuss how their systematic inclusion into gravitational waveform models is essential for the scientific exploitation of current and future detectors, from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA network to the space-based LISA observatory, which will observe a rich variety of sources with unprecedented sensitivity and open a new era of precision gravitational wave astronomy.