Measuring the properties of nearly extremal black holes with gravitational waves

Understand

Characterizing the properties of black holes is one of the most important science objectives for gravitational-wave observations.

• Astrophysical evidence suggests that black holes that are nearly extremal (i.e.
• spins near the theoretical upper limit) might exist and thus might be among the merging black holes observed with gravitational waves.
• In this paper, we explore how well current gravitational wave parameter estimation methods can measure the spins of rapidly spinning black holes in binaries.