Gravitational waves from neutron stars
- Investigators
- Ian Hawke
Gravitational waves are "ripples in spacetime". Predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity, they are very weak disturbances propagating at the speed of light. They carry information about extremely violent events in the universe. If detected by observatories such as LIGO or LISA we will learn much about matter and gravity in extreme situations.
However, to stand a chance of detecting these waves, and to get the most from a successful observation, we need to simulate the matter (usually using relativistic hydrodynamics) and the spacetime. Work on this at Southampton concentrates on full nonlinear simulations using the Whisky code, mainly through simulating the collapse of supermassive stars and neutron stars to black holes.
Categories
Physical Systems and Engineering simulation: Astrophysics
Algorithms and computational methods: Finite differences
Visualisation and data handling software: Gnuplot, HDF5, VisIt, VTK
Software Engineering Tools: CVS, SVN
Programming languages and libraries: C, C++, Fortran, Matlab, MPI
Computational platforms: Linux