175 orbits!!

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].