The inspiral of a stellar-mass black hole and supermassive black hole. Their gravitational waves will allow us to test the theory of general relativity.
When a stellar-mass black hole orbits a supermassive black hole it undergoes hundreds of thousands of orbital cycles. The smaller black hole acts as a probe, mapping out the geometry of the surrounding spacetime. This information will be encoded into the gravitational waves emitted during the inspiral of the system. With the detection of these waves we will be able to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity, by examining the force of gravity in its strongest regime within the cosmos.