Please contact Beth Demkowski, demkowsk@umich.edu for Zoom link.

The era of gravitational-wave astronomy began in 2015 with LIGO's discovery of gravitational waves from merging black holes in 2015. Since then, LIGO and Virgo have observed dozens of gravitational waves merging black holes and neutron stars; accurate models of these waves are crucial for learning as much as possible about the waves’ astronomical sources. Models of binary black holes require numerical relativity, because all analytic approximations fail near the time of merger. While these models are sufficiently accurate for today’s observatories, avoiding bias in interpreting the waves observed by next-generation observatories on Earth and in space will require next-generation numerical relativity models. In this talk, I will present some recent results in modeling observations of binary black holes withnumerical relativity, and I will discuss progress toward simulating merging black holes with SpECTRE, a next-generation numerical relativity code under development by the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes collaboration.