Via the Cardiff University news website, I found this video of a computer simulation of the binary black-hole coalescence that gave rise to the gravitational wave event GW170104 whose detection was announced yesterday, so I thought I’d share it here.
Here’s the blurb accompanying the video:
The video shows a numerical simulation of a binary black-hole coalescence with masses and spins consistent with the GW170104 observation. The strength of the gravitational wave is indicated by elevation as well as color, with blue indicating weak fields and yellow indicating strong fields. We rescale the amplitude of the gravitational wave during the simulation to show the signal during the entire animation not only close to merger, where it is strongest. The sizes of the black holes are increased by a factor of two to improve visibility. The bottom panel in the video shows the gravitational waveform starting at frequency of 25Hz. The fade in of the video corresponds to a frequency of about 30Hz.
© Numerical-relativistic simulation: S. Ossokine, A. Buonanno (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics) and the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes project; scientific visualization: T. Dietrich (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), R. Haas (NCSA).
The colour scheme gives me a headache, and there’s no sountrack, but it’s quite instructive nonetheless.
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