Kai Hendriks

I am a PhD student working in the gravitational wave astrophysics group at the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen. I am currently researching the astrophysical formation of eccentric black hole binaries and its imprint onto gravitational wave signals.

Feel free to contact me!
kai.hendriks@nbi.ku.dk

Research

Binary black hole formation

Merging black hole binaries that emit gravitational waves can form and evolve in many different ways and environments.  Each of these pathways may leave its unique imprint onto detected gravitational wave signals. We study highly eccentric binaries in three-body encounters, typically occurring in stellar clusters, and have proposed observables in their gravitational wave signal indicative of this formation channel.


See Hendriks et al (2024), Hendriks, Zwick & Samsing (2024), and Samsing, Hendriks et al (2024)

Multi-messenger
astronomy

Gravitational wave sources such as binary neutron star mergers are perfect sites for multi-messenger astronomy. Detection of gravitational waves along with electromagnetic emission from short gamma-ray bursts and kilonovae gives us multiple independent insights into these sources. With the Gravitational Wave Toolbox, we developed an easy-access tool to study gravitational wave detections and their synergies with electromagnetic counterparts.

See Hendriks, Yi & Nelemans (2023)

Binary neutron star
dynamics

Binary neutron star mergers are among the most complex objects in the universe, which makes their gravitational wave signals extremely rich in information. We studied the effect of the orientation of their individual spins, which induces orbital precession. We can find unique imprints of this in the dynamics, gravitational waves and mass ejecta of these systems that have the potential to be detectable.


See Chaurasia, [...], Hendriks, et al (2020)