The binary black hole explorer: on-the-fly visualizations of precessing binary black holes

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Varma, Vijay, Stein, Leo C., Gerosa, Davide
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2018
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866917178690764800
author Varma, Vijay
Stein, Leo C.
Gerosa, Davide
author_facet Varma, Vijay
Stein, Leo C.
Gerosa, Davide
contents Binary black hole mergers are of great interest to the astrophysics community, not least because of their promise to test general relativity in the highly dynamic, strong field regime. Detections of gravitational waves from these sources by LIGO and Virgo have garnered widespread media and public attention. Among these sources, precessing systems (with misaligned black-hole spin/orbital angular momentum) are of particular interest because of the rich dynamics they offer. However, these systems are, in turn, more complex compared to nonprecessing systems, making them harder to model or develop intuition about. Visualizations of numerical simulations of precessing systems provide a means to understand and gain insights about these systems. However, since these simulations are very expensive, they can only be performed at a small number of points in parameter space. We present binaryBHexp, a tool that makes use of surrogate models of numerical simulations to generate on-the-fly interactive visualizations of precessing binary black holes. These visualizations can be generated in a few seconds, and at any point in the 7-dimensional parameter space of the underlying surrogate models. With illustrative examples, we demonstrate how this tool can be used to learn about precessing binary black hole systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1811_06552
institution arXiv
publishDate 2018
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The binary black hole explorer: on-the-fly visualizations of precessing binary black holes
Varma, Vijay
Stein, Leo C.
Gerosa, Davide
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Binary black hole mergers are of great interest to the astrophysics community, not least because of their promise to test general relativity in the highly dynamic, strong field regime. Detections of gravitational waves from these sources by LIGO and Virgo have garnered widespread media and public attention. Among these sources, precessing systems (with misaligned black-hole spin/orbital angular momentum) are of particular interest because of the rich dynamics they offer. However, these systems are, in turn, more complex compared to nonprecessing systems, making them harder to model or develop intuition about. Visualizations of numerical simulations of precessing systems provide a means to understand and gain insights about these systems. However, since these simulations are very expensive, they can only be performed at a small number of points in parameter space. We present binaryBHexp, a tool that makes use of surrogate models of numerical simulations to generate on-the-fly interactive visualizations of precessing binary black holes. These visualizations can be generated in a few seconds, and at any point in the 7-dimensional parameter space of the underlying surrogate models. With illustrative examples, we demonstrate how this tool can be used to learn about precessing binary black hole systems.
title The binary black hole explorer: on-the-fly visualizations of precessing binary black holes
topic High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06552