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

Artist's rendition of a tidal disruption event

This year, Rubin Observatory began the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). LSST's sensitive wide-field time-domain surveys will enable it to discover millions of variable active galactic nuclei and thousands of flares from stars being accreted onto massive black holes (MBHs), providing the widest and deepest census of both active and inactive massive black hole populations to date. LSST is therefore enabling us to characterize the masses, accretion rates, and merger histories of MBHs out to z<6. This will in turn enable better-informed constraints on the MBH binaries and mergers that the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will detect via gravitational waves. Our Focus Initiative leverages the strengths of research groups across astronomy and physics to undertake time-domain studies of MBHs with Rubin. We characterize populations of variable AGN to produce strong constraints on MBH masses, accretion rates and merger histories, identify populations of inactive MBHs detectable as transient tidal disruption events (TDEs), explore associations between neutrino populations and TDE/AGN host galaxies, and make predictions for MBH mergers detectable by LISA and the rates of detectable electromagnetic counterparts. Our work is facilitated by Penn State’s leadership in the LSST AGN Science Collaboration, and by our efforts applying machine learning methods to complementary data from Rubin Observatory and space-based instruments such as Euclid and the recently launched Roman Space Telescope.

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.