What happens when high-velocity black holes hurtle past each other in a close encounter, deflecting through spacetime but never merging? Our latest preprint (led by Oliver Long) presents the first simulations of black-hole scattering generated using the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC).

We are excited to release a major update to our catalog of binary black hole simulations, available here. Such simulations are key to LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA being able to extract science from their gravitational wave detections. This catalog update comes six years after our last catalog, with too many improvements to list here. Our catalog now has 3,756 simulations, the largest and most accurate numerical relativity catalog to date. This data is freely available via our data server (https://data.black-holes.org/) and through the sxs package for python. Here’s a sampling of some more extreme systems in our catalog, showcasing a lot of the physics we can capture: