Binary black hole merger dynamics and waveforms

By John G. Baker, J. Centrella, Dae-Il Choi, M. Koppitz, J. V. Meter. 2006

164 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study dynamics and radiation generation in the last few orbits and merger of a binary black hole system, applying recently developed techniques for simulations of moving black holes. Our analysis of the gravitational radiation waveforms and dynamical black hole trajectories produces a consistent picture for a set of simulations with black holes beginning on circular-orbit trajectories at a variety of initial separations. We find profound agreement at the level of 1% among the simulations for the last orbit, merger and ringdown. We are confident that this part of our waveform result accurately represents the predictions from Einstein's General Relativity for the final burst of gravitational radiation resulting from the merger of an astrophysical system of equal-mass nonspinning black holes. The simulations result in a final black hole with spin parameter a/m=0.69. We also find good agreement at a level of roughly 10% for the radiation generated in the preceding few orbits.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8cfbd2cd904f426e60f32aac236f53f2abe52851

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Gravitational Recoil from Spinning Binary Black Hole Mergers (2007, methodology): “In particular, we have carried out extensive tests (D. Shoemaker et al. 2007, in preparation) for the R1 run from Baker et al. (2006b) and found resolution ranges that yield between third- and fourth-order convergence.”
The Einstein Toolkit: a community computational infrastructure for relativistic astrophysics (2011, background): “, [19–29] and references therein), comparisons between numerical waveforms [30–32], determination of the spin of the remnant BH formed in BH–BH mergers (e.”
Black-hole binaries, gravitational waves, and numerical relativity (2010, methodology): “2006 was a year of many firsts: the first simulations of unequal-mass black holes and the accompanying recoil of the remnant hole (Baker et al., 2006c), the first mergers of spinning black holes (Campanelli et al., 2006d), the first long waveforms (∼ 7 orbits) (Baker et al., 2007c), the first…”
Getting a Kick Out of Numerical Relativity (2006, methodology): “The punctures are allowed to move freely through the grid and are evolved according to a variant of the BaumgarteShapiro-Shibata-Nakamura formulation of Einstein’s equations and gauge conditions as described in Baker et al. (2006b); van Meter et al. (2006).”
Large Merger Recoils and Spin Flips from Generic Black Hole Binaries (2007, methodology): “…Baker et al. 2006b), the effects of elliptical motion (Pretorius 2006) on the gravitational radiation, and waveforms generated from binaries with large initial separations were successfully matched to post-Newtonian theory with very good agreement (Buonanno et al. 2006; Baker et al. 2006c,d).”
Grand unification of AGN activity in the ΛCDM cosmology (2009, background): “For example, a merger of two equal mass BHs both witha = 0 in a circular orbit results in a Kerr BH withaf ≃ 0.69 (Baker et al. 2006b).”