IAC Colloquium today by Nicholas Jannsen; Thursday January 22 2026, 10:30

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Jan 22, 2026, 2:01:10 AM (2 days ago) Jan 22

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Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
IAC seminars

Plato's view on supermassive black hole binaries: Exploring the faintest limit of ESA's Plato space mission

Nicholas Jannsen (Institute for Astronomy, KU Leuven & ING)
Thursday January 22 2026, 10:30 GMT (Aula) - Live streaming Zoom link

The search for supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) seemingly saw the dawn of exploration over the past twenty years with several hundred sub-pc candidates claimed from photometric and spectroscopic surveys monitoring active galactic nuclei (AGNs). While the existence of SMBH pairs have been detected at kpc separation, the observational evidence for sub-pc SMBHBs is however still inconclusive. Finding and
expanding the arsenal of SMBHB candidates is not only vital for understanding the co-evolution with their galactic hosts, but is complementary to pulsar timing arrays searching for low-frequency gravitational waves. With the advancements of upcoming high-precision, wide-field optical photometric surveys, like Vera Rubin’s LSST, robust electromagnetic detections may therefore happen in the near future.
Following the pursuit of confirming SMBHBs in the optical, we explore the possibility of using the ESA Plato space mission to detect the photometric signature of Doppler boosting and gravitational self-lensing events linked to their binarity. Although not designed for it, in this seminar we will discuss how Plato may play an essential role in future searches of SMBHBs and for AGN variability research in general. With a minimum 2-yr baseline per pointing field, our simulation study also serves as a benchmark for the upcoming Plato Guest Observer (GO) call in April 2026 designed for complementary sciences alike