Kelly Holley-Bockelmann

And if each galaxy has a black hole in the center, then when the galaxies merge, presumably the two massive black holes merge too.

Not 100% guaranteed, but that's the research I do.

I use supercomputer simulations to figure out how long that process takes and what kinds of changes that makes to the galaxy that it lives in.

So I study the time scales over which that happens.

Well, yes and no.

I would personally be SOL on that science topic.

But, so I'll come back to the answer to your question here, but I want to make sure that y'all know that LISA would still be great, even if it would not detect any of the massive black holes.

And that is because as soon as LISA turns on, you're going to be able to detect black

All of the individual stellar mass black hole binaries and neutron-style binaries and white dwarf binaries, there's supposedly 10 million of these in our Milky Way.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So by making something as big as Lisa, you're catching...

all of the sources that are loud and orbiting around one another on time scales of an hour.

And there's a lot of astrophysics that does that.

Like, yes, there's these massive black holes that I love when they're colliding, but also these individual stellar compact object binaries is what they're called.

There's even these things that are called EMRIs, extreme mass ratio in spirals.

And that is one massive black hole, but then little black holes orbiting around each other.

They take a million years to do that.

Oh, wow.

And so they're like orbiting around this.