The most powerful astrophysical events: Gravitational-wave peak luminosity of binary black holes as predicted by numerical relativity

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For a brief moment, a binary black hole (BBH) merger can be the most powerful astrophysical event in the visible universe.

• Here we present a model fit for this gravitational-wave peak luminosity of nonprecessing quasicircular BBH systems as a function of the masses and spins of the component black holes, based on numerical relativity (NR) simulations and the hierarchical fitting approach introduced by X.
• Jim\'enez-Forteza et al.
• [Phys.