SXS Project
@SXSProject
Followers
707
Following
37
Media
31
Statuses
116
Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes: Black holes, neutron stars, and beyond.
Joined April 2013
0
6
10
And now you can read all about it in Caltech's press release!
caltech.edu
A collaboration between physicists at Caltech and other institutions has released an expanded and refined catalog of simulations of black hole mergers.
🎉 Happy paper publication day! 🎉 Our third catalog of binary black hole simulations, now published in Classical and Quantum Gravity. And it's open access! Scheel et al. 2025 Class. Quantum Grav. 42 195017 https://t.co/LGP0vMgLQk Also on the @arxiv at
0
2
4
🎉 Happy paper publication day! 🎉 Our third catalog of binary black hole simulations, now published in Classical and Quantum Gravity. And it's open access! Scheel et al. 2025 Class. Quantum Grav. 42 195017 https://t.co/LGP0vMgLQk Also on the @arxiv at
arxiv.org
We present a major update to the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Collaboration's catalog of binary black hole simulations. Using highly efficient spectral methods implemented in the Spectral...
We are excited to release a major update to our catalog of binary black hole simulations, available at https://t.co/LoIQoEUkN0! Such simulations are key to LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA being able to extract science from their gravitational wave detections. 1/14
0
4
10
Just published in @PhysRevLett! Check out this article by SXS researchers Boyeneni, Wu and Most (@Caltech) on interpreting colliding black holes similar to the attraction of two electric charges
Gravitational field equations describing binary black holes can be recast in a form resembling coupled Maxwell’s equations for electrodynamics https://t.co/UCJyb693c2
0
1
4
Cranking up the temperature! SXS researchers Hai-Yang Wang, Elias Most and Philip Hopkins (@Caltech) show how hot flows around supermassive black hole binaries with strong magnetic fields alter their feeding behavior. Full results at https://t.co/hJtILs4O7D
0
1
7
Earthquakes on neutron stars?! SXS researchers Louis Burnaz and Elias Most (@Caltech) and Ashley Bransgrove (@Princeton) simulate how these could be detected in signals from very active radio burst transients. Read their results at https://t.co/Ny2ljbdhsC
0
1
3
@ego_virgo @LIGOLA @LIGOWA @KAGRA_PR A spacetime waltz. Simulations consistent with our 86 most confident new detections, each showing the orbiting components and their emitted gravitational waves https://t.co/5sUk1ip9Io 🎬I Markin/T Dietrich/H Pfeiffer/SXS Collaboration #GWTC4 #O4IsHere
2
8
41
Take a look at the biggest black hole merger ever detected!😲🌌‼️ ~10 billion light years from Earth the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory(#LIGO) detected gravitational waves from the merge of 2 massive black holes Credit: SXS Project( https://t.co/6kpbeBwiMc)
2
5
25
Check out this article about star quakes and monster shocks — research done by SXS collaboration members Yoonsoo Kim and Elias Most, both at @Caltech
To better understand the extreme physics underlying such a grizzly demise, researchers at Caltech are using supercomputers to simulate black hole–neutron star collisions. https://t.co/Wz0ufXUJ7z
0
0
0
In particular, as highlighted through Fig. 9 of the paper, while our BBH simulations are generally accurate and long enough (to span the full frequency band) for the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA detectors, this is not necessarily the case for future detectors. 2/n
1
1
6
There’s a lot more work to do: higher mass ratios, higher eccentricity, and meeting the accuracy requirements of next-generation detectors. Stay tuned for the next version of our catalog! But for now, check out the latest catalog paper at https://t.co/LoIQoEUkN0. 14/14
arxiv.org
We present a major update to the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Collaboration's catalog of binary black hole simulations. Using highly efficient spectral methods implemented in the Spectral...
0
0
2
We make it publicly available so everyone has high-quality binary black hole simulation data at their fingertips for their research! Of course, we’re not done yet— 13/14
1
0
1
Six years is a long time, so there are too many details to summarize here. You can read about all of them in the new SXS catalog paper. We have already been doing a ton of science with this data ( https://t.co/XXh74tyZoh for a list of paper using SpEC). 12/14
1
0
1
Because we generated so much data, we needed a new waveform format, which is typically 6 times more compressed than before. The new format is handled seamlessly by the sxs package, which also fetches and caches waveforms (and other data) as needed. 11/14
1
0
1
Out of the 2,018 simulations in the last catalog paper, we deprecated 282. We added 2,020 new non-deprecated simulations (and even uploaded another 112 new but deprecated simulations). 10/14
1
0
1
More recent simulations are more accurate than older ones, and some old simulations had issues that were only uncovered recently. Therefore we now deprecate simulations if we need (though the old data remains available, by passing an argument in the sxs package). 9/14
1
0
1
Over the years, we made many improvements to the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC, https://t.co/ngf8uOMmIb) that performed all these simulations (Sec. 3 discusses our methods and some of these improvements). 8/14
1
0
1
Eight pages of the new paper are dedicated to studying the quality of our waveforms! For example, one of our plots shows how well different angular harmonics are converging (we provide all the way up to ℓ=8). Our median waveform difference between resolutions is 4*10^-4. 7/14
1
0
1
Our spectral methods continue to be highly efficient—over 1,000 times more efficient than finite-difference methods of comparable accuracy. We always provide multiple resolutions, so anyone can verify our numerical convergence. 6/14
1
0
1
The median simulation length is 22 orbits, while the longest is 148 orbits. Here’s a visual overview of the before and after of our parameter-space coverage: 5/14
1
0
1
Here’s a sampling of some more extreme systems in our catalog, showcasing a lot of the physics we can capture: 4/14
2
1
2