News and Updates

The SXS collaboration has produced the first computation of black hole binary coalescence that is capable of following the black holes for over 175 orbits until they collide. Previous computations were limited to only a few dozen orbits. The ability to track many orbits is important for testing the post-Newtonian approximation and for producing waveforms that cover the entire range of frequencies that will be seen by LIGO. See the preprint at [arXiv:1502.04953].

The SXS collaboration can now simulate binaries containing black holes that spin at a rate of 99.4% of their maximum theoretical value, the fastest spins ever simulated. The technical improvements allowing such large spins are reported at [arXiv:1412.1803] and an investigation of the maximum spin during binary coalescence can be found at [arXiv:1411.7297].

Members of the SXS collaboration are pleased to announce new movies [1] and [2] that show how the night sky would look in the presence of a binary black hole merger.

Kate Henriksson and some of her fellow members of the SXS collaboration produced newer and better data for simulations of neutron stars colliding with black holes. Using advanced numerical techniques, the neutron stars they’ve constructed are the densest ever created, which will lead to some of the most extreme simulations in the world. Check out the preprint at [arXiv:1409.7159].

The spins of the black holes are transverse to the infall direction, anti-aligned and of magnitude 0.5. This simulation is described in a publication Phys. Rev. D, also available at [arXiv:gr-qc/0907.0869].