What am I looking at?

You're watching two massive objects — black holes or neutron stars — spiraling into each other and merging. The rippling grid is spacetime itself, bending under their gravity. The sound is the gravitational wave signal, shifted into the range of human hearing.

Scenes

Merger — real events from LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA on a deforming spacetime grid
Sandbox — build your own binary, tweak masses and spins
Black Hole — orbit a ray-traced Schwarzschild black hole
N-Body — gravitational simulator with collision physics

View modes (⚙)

Explorer — clean, minimal interface
Student — detailed labels and physics equations
Researcher — full data with uncertainties, equations, and data export

Masses

How heavy each object is, measured in solar masses (M☉ = our Sun's mass)

Chirp mass

A combined mass that determines how the signal "chirps" — the key parameter detectors measure

Distance

How far away this happened, in megaparsecs (1 Mpc ≈ 3.26 million light-years)

Final mass

The mass of the merged remnant — always less than the sum of the two original objects

Energy radiated

Mass converted into gravitational wave energy (E = mc²). This is the "missing" mass

Effective spin

Whether the objects spin in the same direction (+1) or opposite (−1). Zero means no net spin alignment

Redshift

How much the universe expanded while the waves traveled to us — higher means older and farther

SNR

Signal-to-noise ratio. Higher = clearer detection. GW150914 had SNR 24, extremely loud

Confidence (p_astro)

Probability this is a real astrophysical event vs. detector noise. > 0.99 means near-certain

Keyboard shortcuts

Space Play / Pause • S Speed • M Map • P Screenshot • / Search • T Tours

Embed on your site

Use an iframe with URL params:
?embed=true&scene=blackhole
Scenes: merger, sandbox, blackhole, nbody

Gravitational Wave Events

Guided Tours