Event type
Event date
Venue
Hybrid: Sala Sousa Pinto and Teams
Speaker
Andrea Maselli (Gran Sasso Science Institute)
Event Website
Astrophysical environments provide an arena to test vacuum General Relativity with gravitational waves. In this talk, I will discuss what binary black hole observations can probe beyond the vacuum paradigm, and where fundamental limitations arise. I will examine how surrounding matter or fields can affect the orbital dynamics and waveform phasing, and clarify which effects are degenerate with intrinsic binary parameters or standard vacuum corrections. I will also comment on relevant observables and systematic uncertainties, outlining the regimes in which current and next-generation detectors may constrain departures from vacuum predictions, as well as those in which such tests remain challenging.