Making waves… Gravitational waves, that is. This visualization—performed on our Pleiades supercomputer—shows gravitational waves emitted by two black holes of nearly equal mass as they spiral together and merge. Yellow illustrates the strong curvature of space-time, while orange ripples represent distortions of space-time caused by the orbiting masses. As the distortions spread out and weaken, they become gravitational waves (purple). | NASA Ames Research Center