News and Updates

A postdoctoral researcher in our collaboration, Keefe Mitman —a NASA Hubble Fellow at Cornell University, was recently featured in a Youtube video by journalist Fraser Cain: Everything You Need to Know About Gravitational Waves in 2026. In the video, Keefe and Fraser discuss recent progress by the LVK gravitational-wave detectors as well as the potential future of gravitational-wave science and everything that it has to offer.

How much information can we gain by pushing numerical relativity to its limit by simulating black hole scattering encounters when one is much larger than the other or when they are far apart and only weakly interacting? Our latest preprint (led by Oliver Long) explores these extreme regions of the black-hole scattering parameter space using simulations generated using the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC).

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.