The binary black hole explorer: on-the-fly visualizations of precessing
  binary black holes
  Binary black hole mergers are of great interest to the astrophysics
community, not least because of their promise to test general relativity in the
highly dynamic, strong field regime. Detections of gravitational waves from
these sources by LIGO and Virgo have garnered widespread media and public
attention. Among these sources, precessing systems (with misaligned black-hole
spin/orbital angular momentum) are of particular interest because of the rich
dynamics they offer. However, these systems are, in turn, more complex compared
to nonprecessing systems, making them harder to model or develop intuition
about. Visualizations of numerical simulations of precessing systems provide a
means to understand and gain insights about these systems. However, since these
simulations are very expensive, they can only be performed at a small number of
points in parameter space. We present binaryBHexp, a tool that makes use of
surrogate models of numerical simulations to generate on-the-fly interactive
visualizations of precessing binary black holes. These visualizations can be
generated in a few seconds, and at any point in the 7-dimensional parameter
space of the underlying surrogate models. With illustrative examples, we
demonstrate how this tool can be used to learn about precessing binary black
hole systems.
