Together with collaborators from across Europe and the US, CENTRA researchers (including Prof. D. Hilditch) have been working to understand how gravitational waves behave at the threshold of black hole formation. Treating these solutions has posed a difficult challenge for around 30 years. In recent work, published in physical review letters, the collaboration compared results from three independent numerical relativity codes. They find excellent agreement. The evidence suggests that intuition from spherical model problems are not borne out with nonlinear gravitational waves-- instead the solution space appears to be very subtle!
See media coverage also here.
