the Science
~ four main areas we study ~
Active Research
Binary black hole scattering with SpEC
Created on July 14, 2025
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).
Major SXS catalog update
Created on May 19, 2025
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: