Latest in the series of our spin-precession papers, here we found a thing that was worthy of a new name: wide nutation (we had wide precession before, but this is better). These are black-hole binary configurations where the angle between any of the two spins and the orbital angular momentum changes a lot. Can’t change more actually: spins goes from full alignment to full anti-alignment. And they do it many times.

ps. We found this wide precession during Alicia’s SURF undergraduate summer project at Caltech. Jackpot!

Davide Gerosa, Alicia Lima, Emanuele Berti, Ulrich Sperhake, Michael Kesden, Richard O’Shaughnessy.
Classical and Quantum Gravity 36 (2019) 10, 105003.
arXiv:1811.05979 [gr-qc].
Supporting material available here.