Visualizations

As emphasized in the Sounds link above, the information content of GWs themselves are best regarded as aural in character rather than visual. That doesn’t mean, however, that we cannot learn a lot by examining what an evolving system looks like. Indeed, by synchronizing a GW source’s video with the sound of its GWs, we can get a pretty good impression of how the information content of the GWs relates to the dynamics of its source.

Right now, we have several visualizations which illustrate the character of both extreme mass ratio sources, and comparable mass binaries. Most of these videos were made by former UROP student Peter Reinhardt; one of the EMRI examples was made by former student and collaborator Steve Drasco. We also have several visualizations showing how a black hole’s event horizon is tidally distorted by the gravity of a small orbiting companion; these were made by former student Stephen O’Sullivan, based on work by O’Sullivan and Hughes.

All videos are hosted on YouTube; original files available to colleagues upon request.

• Extreme mass-ratio inspiral
• Embeddings of dynamical event horizons
• Comparable mass binaries