News and Updates

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:

What happens when a neutron star is swallowed whole by a companion black hole? For a typical merger scenario, the lack of matter left outside the remnant black hole is thought to make such mergers quiet in electromagnetic bands. However, if the infalling neutron star harbors a strong magnetic field and is surrounded with tenuous, highly magnetized plasma (magnetosphere), a strong disturbance in the circumbinary magnetosphere can drive powerful electromagnetic bursts.

Happy Black Hole Week! To celebrate, we’re releasing the highest-resolution ray-traced still from one of our simulations to date. This image was produced by Cornell research associate William Throwe. Use your scroll wheel or the +/- buttons to zoom in/out, or the icon to go full screen!

With our latest preprint [arXiv:2412.06887] (led by Marina De Amicis), SXS simulations have for the first time resolved fully nonlinear “tails” from merging black holes. What’s this all about?