Michele's wiki/blog

Authors: Tanja Bode, Deirdre Shoemaker, Frank Herrmann, Ian Hinder

Date: 5 Nov 2007

Abstract: We present an investigation into how sensitive the last orbits and merger of binary-black-hole systems are to the presence of spurious radiation in the initial data. Our numerical experiments consist of a binary-black-hole system starting at the last couple of orbits before merger with additional spurious radiation centered at the origin and the initial angular momentum held fixed. As the energy in the radiation increases, the binary is invariably hardened, i.e. the merger of the two black holes is hastened. The change in merger time becomes significant when the additional energy provided by the spurious radiation increases the M_ADM of the spacetime by about 1%. While the final masses of the black holes increase due to partial absorption of the radiation, the final spins remain constant to within our numerical accuracy. We conjecture that the spurious radiation is primarily increasing the eccentricity of the orbit and secondarily increasing the mass of the black holes while propagating out to infinity.

abs pdf