Pfeiffer wins Bessel Award

CITA Professor Harald Pfeiffer has been awarded a Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The award honors Prof. Pfeiffer’s outstanding research record, and invites him to a long-term research stay in Germany.  Pfeiffer, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Numerical Relativity and Gravitational Wave Astrophysics, performs research on black holes and Neutron stars.  He uses Canadian supercomputers to investigate what happens when such objects collide with each other.  Of particular importance is the emission of gravitational waves, ripples in space and time itself, emitted by such collisions.  Special-purpose gravitational wave detectors in the U.S., Europe and Japan are searching for these waves, to gain new insights into black holes and Neutron stars that emit gravitational waves, and into any other astrophysical processes that emit gravitational waves.  Pfeiffer is also a member of the CITA research group that contributes to analyzing the data of the LIGO, Virgo and GEO gravitational wave detectors, located in the U.S., Italy and Germany, respectively. 


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Dark-heaving—boundless,
endless, and sublime,
The image of eternity—
the Throne of the Invisible...

From Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Canto IV,
Stanza 183

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The SXS project is a collaborative research effort involving multiple institutions. Our goal is the simulation of black holes and other extreme spacetimes to gain a better understanding of Relativity, and the physics of exotic objects in the distant cosmos.

The SXS project is supported by Canada Research Chairs, CFI, CIfAR, Compute Canada, Max Planck Society, NASA, NSERC, the NSF, Ontario MEDI, the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, and XSEDE.

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