Embedded Files
aurel released!
aurel released!
3 February 2026
Led by Dr Robyn Munoz, aurel an open-source Python package, to automate relativistic calculations, has been released. It can compute both symbolic and numerical quantities, supporting both simulations and analytical models. The automated design provides a flexible and user-friendly framework to streamline post-processing workflows.
DiRAC Research Image Competition 2025 results!
DiRAC Research Image Competition 2025 results!
January 2026
Rahime Matur's image was selected as the March calendar image of the DiRAC Research Image Competition 2025. She is a PhD student at the University of Southampton, working on numerical relativity and general relativistic hydrodynamics simulations of compact object mergers, focusing on black hole-neutron star systems and their multi-messenger signatures.
WHEN A BLACK HOLE DISRUPTS A NEUTRON STAR
The snapshot depicts a fully general relativistic hydrodynamical simulation of a black hole-neutron star merger with the same chirp mass but a higher black hole spin than that of the observed event GW230529. Tidal disruption triggers mass ejection, while material from the inner tidal tail accretes onto the black hole, increasing its mass and forming an accretion disk. All these processes occur within tens of milliseconds. The ejected matter later powers electromagnetic counterparts through interactions with the interstellar medium and the radioactive decay of freshly synthesised r-process elements, similar to those found in the Solar System. The simulation was performed on Memory Intensive, Durham, using the Einstein Toolkit, WhiskyTHC, and CTGamma, with visualisation via PostCactus.
MHDuet-AMReX released!
MHDuet-AMReX released!
15 October 2025
Developed within the Simflowny collaboration, with UK contributions led by Dr Miguel Bezares (University of Nottingham) and support from DIRAC RSE, the GPU-enabled version of MHDuet, an open source evolution code for GRMHD with neutrino transport, has been released!
what no one has seen before...
what no one has seen before...
Further Resources
15 October 2025
An article on warp drive collapse involving Dr Katy Clough at Queen Mary University of London and Dr Sebastian Khan Cardiff University made it into the Daily Star!
Despite originating in science fiction, warp drives have a concrete description in general relativity, with Alcubierre first proposing a spacetime metric that supported faster-than-light travel. Whilst there are numerous practical barriers to their implementation in real life, including a requirement for negative energy, computationally, one can simulate their evolution in time given an equation of state describing the matter.
In this work, we studied the signatures arising from a warp drive "containment failure", assuming a stiff equation of state for the fluid. We compute the emitted gravitational-wave signal and track the energy fluxes of the fluid. Apart from its rather speculative application to the search for extraterrestrial life in gravitational-wave detector data, this work is interesting as a study of the dynamical evolution and stability of spacetimes that violate the null energy condition. Our work highlights the importance of exploring strange new spacetimes, to (boldly) simulate what no one has seen before.
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