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August 11, 2006

An Attractive 'Spin' on a Dark Subject

by Scott Hawley, The University of Texas at Austin

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Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin's Center for Relativity (CfR) are using computers from the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to provide a better understanding of the interactions between spinning black holes.

The CfR research team, Director Richard Matzner, postdoctoral fellow Scott Hawley (who recently joined the faculty at Belmont University) and undergraduate student Michael Vitalo, investigated the strength of the gravitational attraction between two black holes as the direction of each hole's spin changed, as a way of better understanding the dynamics of what are thought to be the strongest sources of gravitational waves detectable on earth. These findings are the subject of the authors' latest paper -- "Spin Dependence in Computational Black Hole Data" --- and will ultimately expand our understanding of the universe. The paper has been submitted to the American Physical Society, Physical Review D.

The Search for Ripples in Spacetime

The field of gravitational physics is in the midst of a great revival, largely driven by the construction of gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory). These sophisticated laser interferometers are the most sensitive instruments ever designed by man (sensitive to 1 part in 10^21) and are designed to measure tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime, called gravitational waves, from distant astronomical sources. The strongest of these sources are binary black holes, which spiral in towards one another and merge to form a single black hole, all the while giving off strong gravitational waves.

To separate the astrophysical signals from background noise in the detector, scientists need to have a solid idea of what they're trying to find. This is a "needle in the haystack" problem of grand proportions, and sophisticated "template" waveforms are in great demand for use in picking out the true signals from the detectors' data.

These template wave forms can be obtained through closed-form analytical calculations when the holes are far apart and after the final merger occurs, but for the "in between" period, only numerical computations are able to provide the full solution to Einstein's nonlinear gravitational equations. Recently, the field of "numerical relativity" has itself been undergoing great change, as sophisticated 3-D simulations of binary black hole mergers have finally begun to simulate beyond a single orbit. Simulations of multiple orbits are needed for accurate waveforms; however, Einstein's nonlinear equations pose such significant challenges that up until the past year, all simulations would crash prior to a full orbit due to numerical instabilities.

Simulations performed by Caltech's Frans Pretorius using TACC's 1024-processor Linux cluster, Lonestar, represented the first full inspiral and merger simulation that lasted longer than an orbit. More recently, UT Brownsville and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center have extended these results using new "gauge conditions" for the coordinates of the simulation. These developments were featured in a recent science news article (R. Cowen, "Crash: Ripples of space-time debut in black holes simulations," Science News 169, 2006).

Almost all of these simulations, however, neglect the significant role that the black holes' spin will have on the evolution of the system. This current work by Hawley, Vitalo and Matzner aims to provide greater insight into the role of spin for binary black hole systems.

The Role of "Spin" in Black Hole Interactions

According to general relativity, the rotation of an object can have a gravitational effect on the object's surroundings, in addition to the usual gravitational attraction due to the object's mass. This latter effect is dominant, so two objects are always attracted, but in the case of two spinning masses, their spins can provide either an additional attraction or a small repulsion to the overall gravitational interaction. In this way, two spinning black holes can be loosely compared to a pair of magnets, which repel each other when their north poles are facing one another, and attract each other when opposite poles are near each other. The actual interactions for spinning black holes is more complicated than those of magnets, and the precise angular dependence of the spin-spin effects can only be computed either analytically in perturbative asymptotic regimes, or generally in full numerical simulations.

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