SXS News & Updates

SXS News & Updates

Pfeiffer wins Bessel Award

Details: Created on Monday, 16 November 2015 23:05

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.

175 orbits!!

Details: Created on Tuesday, 17 February 2015 18:51

Feb 17 2015
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 here
(http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04953).

New Movies

Details: Created on Tuesday, 28 October 2014 19:16

Members of the SXS collaboration are pleased to announce new movies
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNnBnRuzHJ0) and
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Kgfxl1Jk6k) that show how the night
sky would look in the presence of a binary black hole merger. The
image is distorted because the light rays that reach your eye don't
follow straight lines, but are bent (dramatically) by the enormous
spacetime curvature near the black holes. The paths of individual
light rays are computed in order to make these movies. Details can be
found in this paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.7775).

More quickly rotating black holes

Details: Created on Thursday, 04 December 2014 19:17

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 here (http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1803) and an investigation of the maximum spin during binary coalescence can be found here (http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.7297)