Studies in Theoretical Astrophysics and General Relativity

Stuart Shapiro, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Stuart Shapiro, Milton Ruiz, Lunan Sun, Antonios Tsokaros, Samuel Qunell, Jing Zhou, jinghan Huang, Mit Kotak, Eric Yu

We request a Blue Waters allocation to tackle several large-scale, long-standing, unsolved problems in theoretical astrophysics and numerical relativity. We numerically solve the Einstein field equations coupled to the relativistic magnetohydrodynamic equations to simulate the inspiral and merger of binary compact objects (COs), as well as isolated COs, in full general relativity. These include binary black holes (BHBHs), both in vacuum and surrounded by magnetized disks, binary neutron stars (NSNSs), binary black hole-neutron stars (BHNSs), ergostars, and supermassive stars. We are interested in the study of gravitational and electromagnetic radiation generated from these sources (“multimessenger astronomy”). Our numerical studies address fundamental questions dealing with strong-field gravitation and focus on problems that are motivated by present and future observations of gravitational waves by aLIGO/VIRGO, GEO, KAGRA, PTAs, LISA, and other laser interferometers now operating or under development. Our simulations also model promising gamma-ray burst sources (GRBs) observed by NASA satellites such as SWIFT, INTEGRAL and FERMI, Xray sources observed by NICER, CHANDRA, and XMM-Newton, and optical and infrared sources observed by the HST, NuSTAR and PanSTARRS telescopes. A successful completion of this research that is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) will only be possible if our team acquires the necessary computational resources to do so.