2024/12/09 by Marina De Amicis, Marina de Amicis, Hannes Rüter +42 · 1 voice · 12 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Binary black hole #Binary number #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Black hole (networking) #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #General relativity #Nonlinear system #Numerical relativity #Perturbation (astronomy) #Perturbation theory (quantum mechanics) #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research
paper · pdf · open access · doi:10.1103/2brx-xnyr
published in Physical Review Letters 135(17), 171401 (American Physical Society)
openalex publication_date 2025/09/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
We uncover late-time gravitational-wave tails in fully nonlinear 3+1 dimensional numerical relativity simulations of merging black holes, using the highly accurate spec code. We achieve this result by exploiting the strong magnification of late-time tails due to binary eccentricity, recently observed in perturbative evolutions, and showcase here the tail presence in head-on configurations for several mass ratios close to unity. We validate the result through a large battery of numerical tests and detailed comparison with a perturbative evolution, which display striking agreement with full nonlinear ones in the ringdown regime, and very similar tail morphologies. Our results offer yet another confirmation of the highly predictive power of black hole perturbation theory in the presence of a source, even when applied to nonlinear solutions. The late-time tail signal is much more prominent than anticipated until recently, and possibly within reach of gravitational-wave detector measurements, unlocking observational investigations of an additional set of general relativistic predictions on the long-range gravitational dynamics.