ACADEMIA

• Scientists at Ciències Institut de l'Espai have used the calculating capacity of CESGA for investigation.
• "With the help of supercomputers we can deduce exactly how black holes move, which signals are emitting gravitational waves, and how have these waves to reach Earth"

Simulating spatiotemporal conditions of black hole systems in a supercomputer is one of the ways in which the scientific community can detect these regions of space with enormous density and concentrate a large amount of mass within a gravitational field generating such that no particle, not even light, can escape it. The computing power of the supercomputer 'Finis Terrae' at the Supercomputing Center of Galicia (CESGA) allows scientists Ulrich Sperhake and Carlos F. Sopuerta of the Institut de l'Espai (CSIC-IEEC) in Barcelona to run these simulations. 

As the researcher Ulrich Sperhake reminds us, "The Theory of General Relativity Einstein predicted that astrophysical objects such as neutron stars and black holes emit gravitational radiation, ripples in the geometry of space-time that travel through the universe at the speed of light. Such waves are observed to produce distortions in the shape and size of ground and space sensors, and are so small that they need to know in advance the details of its structure. Thus, we can identify the gravity waves in the measurements of the interferometer laser."

Essential Supercomputers

The strongest gravitational waves are produced by systems of two black holes and "Einstein's theory, which tells us how these holes behave, is very complicated, but with the help of supercomputers we can figure out exactly how the holes black move, what signals gravitational waves are emitting, and how have these waves to reach Earth,” explains Sperhake.
The simulations performed on supercomputers like FinisTerrae at CESGA, says the researcher, "give us this information, which scientists have to operate laser detectors, those seeking these waveforms on the data obtained," allowing them to locate black holes in this way.
Carlos F. Sopuerta states in this regard that "the main detectors are now being 'reconstructed' to go to the so-called advanced models, which, in effect, we expect to locate black holes resulting from the collision of binary systems, neutron stars or black holes. The reason why previous detectors have not made detections is because the cosmos is not covered enough so that in the few years we have operated these detections were likely."

FOR MORE INFORMATION
sperhake@tapir.caltech.edu
sopuerta@aliga.ieec.uab.es LINKS A PUBLICACIONES ESPECIALIZADAS a) U.Sperhake, V.Cardoso, C.D.Ott, E.Schnetter & H.Witek "Collisions of unequal mass black holes and the point particle limit" Phys. Rev. D 84 (2011) 084038
http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v84/i8/e084038
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.5391.pdf b) C.F.Sopuerta & N.Yunes "New Kludge Scheme for the Construction of Approximate Waveforms for Extreme-Mass-Ratio Inspirals" Phys. Rev. D 84 (2011) 124060
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.84.124060
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.0572.pdf c) P.Ajith et al. "The NINJA-2 catalog of hybrid post-Newtonian/numerical-relativity waveforms for non-precessing black-hole binaries" . submitted to Class.Quantum Grav.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.5319.pdf