This spring, Gaurav Khanna noticed that the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth physics department was more crowded than usual. Why, he wondered, were so many students suddenly so interested in science?

It wasn’t a thirst for knowledge, it turns out. News of Dr. Khanna’s success in building a supercomputer using only PlayStation 3 video game consoles had spread quickly; the students, a lot of them gamers, just wanted to gape at the sight of nearly 200 consoles stacked on one another.

“It caused quite a stir around here,” Dr. Khanna said.

A black hole physicist and associate director of the university’s Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization Research, Dr. Khanna first networked 16 PlayStation 3 consoles in 2007 to help model black hole collisions.

His research is focused on finding and studying gravitational waves, vibrations that ripple through space-time. The waves, first predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, form after a particularly violent astrophysical event, like two black holes smashing together. Because black holes cannot be observed through telescopes, Dr. Khanna uses supercomputers to create simulations of these collisions.