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Massive Black Holes in the Era of Rubin: From Optical Variability to Multi-Messenger Signatures

IGC apple Logo created by Monica Rincon Ramirez

On June 29th of 2026, the Rubin Observatory began the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). LSST's g~24.7 mag single-exposure depths in the wide and deep time-domain surveys across six optical bands will enable it to discover millions of variable active galactic nuclei and thousands of tidal disruption events, providing the widest and deepest census of active and inactive massive black hole (MBH) populations to date. LSST will therefore enable us to characterize the masses, accretion rates, and merger histories of MBHs out to z<5. This will enable better-informed constraints on the MBH binaries and mergers that the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will detect via gravitational waves. This focus initiative will work on understanding massive black hole variability in the LSST deep-drilling fields, preparing for LISA, studying TDEs and AGN across Rubin, Euclid, Roman, and LS4, and understanding high-energy neutrinos in tidal disruption events.

Name Role Affiliations Email Phone Office Centers Research topics
Weixiang Yu Weixiang Yu Postdoc Astronomy wuy10@psu.edu – 520 Davey Laboratory RubinEra Astroinformatics, Astrostatistics, Black Holes, Cosmic Surveys, Gravitational Waves, Multimessenger Astrophysics, Neutrinos, Dynamic Universe
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.