Universality of Curvature Invariants in Critical Vacuum Gravitational Collapse.

We report on a numerical study of gravitational waves undergoing gravitational collapse due to their self-interaction. We consider several families of asymptotically flat initial data which, similar to the well-known Choptuik's discovery, can be fine-tuned between dispersal into empty space and collapse into a black hole. We find that near-critical spacetimes exhibit behavior similar to scalar-field collapse: For different families of initial data, we observe universal "echoes" in the form of irregularly repeating, approximate, scaled copies of the same piece of spacetime.