Phil Lynch

I model the gravitational waves that come from binary black holes where one is a supermassive black hole and the other is a much smaller (but still pretty huge) stellar mass black hole, known as Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals. As you can see, these things get pretty complicated 🧪⚛️🎢🔭🧮

OTD 11 years ago we discovered an event that birthed a whole new field of astronomy ✨ Happy Birthday #GW150914! 🥳 #GravitationalWaves #BlackHoles

Happy to announce my work on applying NITs to the dynamics of eccentric comparable mass black hole binaries is finally on the arxiv! I've been working on this project since I started my postdoc so I am delighted to finally get this over the line! arxiv.org/abs/2606.30594

Here's an Open Letter about the new "strategy" from Research Ireland. You might consider signing it. #Speirgorm openletter.earth/concern-abou...

From @laurie-amen.bsky.social: Did you know that many observed black holes theoretically shouldn’t exist? Today’s paper gathers gravitational wave evidence for how these impossible black holes might have formed. ⚛️ 🔭 ☄️ 🧪 astrobites.org/2026/05/09/many-mergers-might-fill-mass-gap/

How much information can we gain by pushing numerical relativity to its limit by simulating black hole scattering encounters? My latest paper (below) explores these extreme regions of the black-hole scattering parameter space using simulations generated using the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC).

Three papers from the Multiscale Self-Force (MSF) collaboration on the arXiv yesterday that made use of the BHPToolkit. The first was "Spin-aligned inspiral waveforms from self-force and post-Newtonian theory" by Loïc Honet et al. arxiv.org/abs/2510.16112

Groundbreaking new image! The EHT reveals the dynamic environment around black hole M87*. The 2021 image shows a distinct shift in polarization patterns, tracing changes in magnetic fields near the event horizon. eventhorizontelescope.org/new-eht-imag...

Recent paper the cites the BHPToolkit: "Systematic errors in fast relativistic waveforms for Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals" by Hassan Khalvati, Philip Lynch, Ollie Burke, Lorenzo Speri, Maarten van de Meent, Zachary Nasipak, arxiv.org/abs/2509.08875

A Decade of Gravitational Waves This is just a quick post to mark the fact that it is now ten years to the day since the first detection of gravitational waves by Advanced LIGO. The acronym LIGO stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory. It wasn't until February 11th 2016 that…

I’m incredibly proud to be part of this and to have my simulations turn into the first publicly available scattering and dynamical capture waveforms! Below is a plot I made for the Einstein Toolkit Blue Book (arXiv:2503.12263) showing the waveforms SXS:BBH:3999 (scatter) and SXS:BBH:4000 (capture).

When simulating orbiting black holes, we move our grid with the holes! One of the key lessons of general relativity is coordinates are meaningless. We exploit this to choose comoving coordinates where the metric changes as little as possible. www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4WG... 🧪⚛️🔭

Welcome to the #LECSTalks! series, where we showcase the people, activity, and science taking place around the LISA Early Career Scientists community. 🎤 Today we feature Ben Leather, postdoctoral researcher at the MPI for Grav Physics, talking about Waveform Modelling with Gravitational Self-Force.

🍾The LIGO - Virgo - KAGRA Collaboration has announced the detection of the 200th candidate gravitational wave signal in this fourth observation period O4!

I spent almost 2 hours painstakingly copying the orbits of all 128 Saturnian moons from the announcement MPEC and reformatting them for visualization... Behold, here are the orbits of ALL 128 MOONS OF SATURN. This isn't just a moon system—it's a literal asteroid belt around Saturn! 🧪🔭☄️

The hardest part of creating a design? Posting it on social media, but anyway, here it is! Neutron stars are insanely dense,(teaspoon of neutron star would weight 4 billion tons on Earth). Some are pulsars, like beacons in space or/and magnetars! 🔭Store: kategraphiccreations.etsy.com #sciart

"The team predicts that the two neutron stars will spiral slowly toward each other in a cosmic dance, ultimately colliding in a kilonova explosion." Inspired by @skuthunur.bsky.social article & thanks to @astro-jje.bsky.social for patiently answering all my silly binary star questions! #Sciart

The 🎉200th paper 🎉 that cites the BHPToolkit: "Lensing and wave optics in the strong field of a black hole" by Juno C. L. Chan, Conor Dyson, Matilde Garcia, Jaime Redondo-Yuste, Luka Vujeva, arxiv.org/abs/2502.14073

Ever wonder how gravitational wave detectors like LISA would hear the signal of binary black holes orbiting around a supermassive black hole? 🔭 Well check out my first 1st author paper investigating that very topic, live on the arXiv today! 🔥📄 arxiv.org/abs/2502.10591 Explainer in 🧵👇 1/10

#February11 is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science #IDWGS. Meet some of our international #WomenInSTEM through #HumansOfLIGO 1/🧵

A new major update to the Teukolsky package has been released (version 1.1.0). A major new feature the the ability to PN expand various Teukolsky radial functions (contribution from Jakob Neef)

A very fascinating paper went up on the arXiv today! Jesse Han & El-Badry et al. reanalysed the 21 known 'hypervelocity' stars in the #milkyway. They find strong evidence that the LMC (Large Milky/Magellanic Cloud) has a supermassive black hole at its core! 🤯 arxiv.org/abs/2502.00102

When things go well, preparing for a lecture is one of my happy places. I get to read, and understand better, stuff that I'm interested in. I get to make diagrams and animations, always fun. Here is an animation of the motion of a star in a disk galaxy for your viewing pleasure: 1/ 🧪🔭

Hello @bsky.app, here's to looking into more #bluesky and beyond... 😉

Woke up this morning to see the sad news of the Palisades and Eaton fires. I hope everyone, their families, and pets are ok. I can't imagine what kind of anxiety it is wondering if your home is ok or not :( Here's some info on the fires based on a project I was working on in 2019. 1/11

First arXiv paper of 2025 that cites the BHPToolkit: "Post-adiabatic waveform-generation framework for asymmetric precessing binaries", Josh Mathews, Adam Pound, arxiv.org/abs/2501.01413

amazing terminology for the hypothetical moon of a moon

Happy birthday to “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy”! Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin completed her thesis on January 1st, 1925*. She found that stars are composed mainly of hydrogen and helium, counter to the idea of the time, that the Sun and Earth were made of similar materials.

Could we tell whether anyone in our galaxy uses a warp drive? This sounds like a crazy question, but it can be answered using numerical GR (one of the fun highlights of the annual theory meeting presented by Katy Clough) 🧵1/7

I visited #Tokyo, #Kyoto, #Osaka, #Nara and Mt. #Fuji for ~2 weeks. #Japan, is a cool place with amazing people! I do travel sketchbooking so I thought I would share my sketches. Usually, they’re scribbled at the sites in awkward positions, but the sketches feel way more organic that way.

Recent paper that cites the BHPToolkit: "Ringdown of a postinnermost stable circular orbit of a rapidly spinning black hole: Mass ratio dependence of higher harmonic quasinormal mode excitation" by Daiki Watarai, arxiv.org/abs/2408.167...

🎉New paper day🎉 A tale of tails! Finally resolved in fully nonlinear 3+1d numerical relativity with @sxs-collaboration.bsky.social simulations. Late-time tails in nonlinear evolutions of merging black holes De Amicis et al. arxiv.org/abs/2412.06887 What's it all about? 🧪⚛️🔭🧮 1/15

Dec 8 - EFT / model building and the anomalous perihelion of mercury arxiv.org/abs/1106.1568 Wells explores how a model building / EFT approach to explaining Mercury's orbit would have worked. He introduces 3 ideas that all can work, and are realized in GR in different gauges.

(6/7) Outside of physics, I’m an avid climber with over 300 outdoor climbs across four countries (trad, sport, and bouldering). Here are my stats if you’re curious:

(3/7) In 2022, I started my postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (AEI) in Potsdam, Germany. Here, I extended my work to include black hole scattering with comparable masses using Numerical Relativity as part of the @sxs-collaboration.bsky.social.