Physical Society Colloquium

Simulation of Binary Black Hole Mergers

Frans Pretorius

University of Alberta

The collision of two black holes is thought to be one of the most energetic events in the universe, emitting in gravitational waves as much as 5-10% of the rest mass energy of the system. An international effort is currently underway to detect gravitational waves from black hole collisions and other cataclysmic events in the universe. The early success of the detectors will rely on the matched filtering technique to extract what are, by the time the waves reach earth, very weak distortions in the local geometry of space and time. In the case of black hole mergers numerical simulations are needed to obtain predictions of waveforms during the final stages of coalescence. In this talk I will describe the computational challenges in simulating black holes within the framework of Einstein's theory of general relativity, and discuss results form recent successful simulations of black hole mergers.