Collisions of unequal mass black holes and the point particle limit
- Institut de Ciencies de l'Espai (CSIC-IEEC), Facultat de Ciencies, Campus UAB, E-08193 Bellaterra (Spain)
- CENTRA, Departamento de Fisica, Instituto Superior Tecnico, Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa - UTL, Av. Rovisco Pais 1, 1049 Lisboa (Portugal)
- California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125 (United States)
- Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, 31 Caroline St. N., Waterloo ON N2L 2Y5 (Canada)
Numerical relativity has seen incredible progress in the last years, and is being applied with success to a variety of physical phenomena, from gravitational wave research and relativistic astrophysics to cosmology and high-energy physics. Here we probe the limits of current numerical setups, by studying collisions of unequal mass, nonrotating black holes of mass ratios up to 1 ratio 100 and making contact with a classical calculation in general relativity: the infall of a pointlike particle into a massive black hole. Our results agree well with the predictions coming from linearized calculations of the infall of pointlike particles into nonrotating black holes. In particular, in the limit that one hole is much smaller than the other, and the infall starts from an infinite initial separation, we recover the point-particle limit. Thus, numerical relativity is able to bridge the gap between fully nonlinear dynamics and linearized approximations, which may have important applications. Finally, we also comment on the 'spurious' radiation content in the initial data and the linearized predictions.
- OSTI ID:
- 21607921
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 84, Issue 8; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.84.084038; (c) 2011 American Institute of Physics; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Inspiral, merger, and ringdown of unequal mass black hole binaries: A multipolar analysis
Gravitational recoil from binary black hole mergers: The close-limit approximation