Explanation

The movie above is a clip. Longer ones can be found below. They show a black hole falling into a much more massive black hole. The gravitational waves produced are shown as waveforms and played as sounds. The frequency of the sound has been boosted so that it can be heard. In just the same way, the clock is made to move fast so that the movies can play in reasonable amounts of time.

Here are links to the full movies. Please do download them, and please do show them to as many people as you like (so long as you credit me).

3 million solar mass hole with 90 solar mass hole (3 min, 78 MB) (or the same in yellow on black)

3 million solar mass hole with 270 solar mass hole (1 min, 26 MB)

3 million solar mass hole with 540 solar mass hole (20 sec 21 MB)

250 solar mass hole with 1.4 solar mass neutron star (10 sec, 9 MB)

100 solar mass hole with 1.4 solar mass neutron star (34 sec, 12 MB) [real time, no sound] (or the same in yellow on black)

circular, 100 solar mass hole with 1.4 solar mass neutron star (31 sec, 12 MB) [real time, no sound]

Technical Details

The numerical calculations that went into these movies were done by Steve Drasco and Curt Cutler. We used our own implementations of the Gair-Glampedakis kludge (PRD 73 064037 or gr-qc/0510129) and the Babak et al quadrupole-octupole waveform approximation (PRD 75 024005 or gr-qc/0607007).