Computer Simulations Predict What Astronomers Will "See" With Gravitational Wave Telescopes When Two Black Holes Collide

In a paper that is to appear in Physical Review Letters on Sept. 17, 2001, a team of young researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute in Golm, near Potsdam and Berlin, Germany) has predicted the gravitational waves that should be emitted when black holes plunge towards each other and merge. The team consists of John Baker (now at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in the USA), Bernd Brügmann, Manuela Campanelli, Carlos Lousto, and Ryoji Takahashi. They call themselves the Lazarus Team.

The most important result of the Lazarus simulations will be to provide gravitational wave astronomers with a set of templates which they can use to recognize the signals in the noise at the output of their detectors. The Lazarus simulations make predictions that are more detailed and more reliable than any before. The Lazarus scientists expect the gravitational waves to be stronger than previously accepted estimates.

Bernard Schutz, one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, observes: "The success of the Lazarus Project at the AEI comes at just the right time. Black hole mergers could provide the first-ever detections, which will be a landmark for Einstein's theory of general relativity. Numerically computed gravitational wave-forms will not only help us to detect and recognize waves from these events, but will help us to deduce from the observations the masses of the holes and their distance from us. Black hole mergers emit no light, radio waves, or X-rays. We can only detect them by catching their gravitational waves."

Previous simulations have not been able to follow the black holes through the whole merger event. Deep inside a black hole lurks a "singularity", a place where gravity gets huge. Computer simulations have had difficulty modelling the waves outside the hole at the same time as the inside.

The key advance by the Lazarus team at the AEI came when they combined two approaches, full numerical simulation for the essentially strong-field regime of the collision and an approximation method, perturbation theory, for computing the radiation from the resulting distorted single black hole. They cut off the full simulation before it went bad, and then used a different method that looked only at the gravitational waves outside the merged hole. Computers again had to calculate this radiation, but they could avoid the problems caused by looking inside the holes.