"Extreme-Kick" Merger: Inspiral of Equal-Mass Black Holes with Spins Anti-parallel and Oriented in the Orbital Plane

The spins of the black holes are anti-parallel, oriented in the orbital plane, and are of magnitude 0.5. In this configuration, the kick of the final black hole has been observed in simulations by Campanelli et. al. to depend on the phase of the binary at the time of merger; more specifically, they found that the kick depended sinusoidally upon the angle between the initial momenta of the BHs and the spins. This simulation will be detailed a future publication in progress; it is discussed in a paper simbitted to Phys. Rev. Lett., available at arXiv:1012.4869.

Movie displaying the evolution of Enn, the tendexes, in the apparent horizons

 

Movie displaying the evolution of Bnn, the vortexes, in the apparent horizons

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Inspiration

Come, you lost Atoms, to your Centre draw,
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:
Rays that have wander'd into Darkness wide,
Return and back into your Sun subside.

From Farid al-Din Attar's
twelfth-century masterpiece
The Conference of the Birds

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About SXS

The SXS project is a collaborative research effort involving multiple institutions. Our goal is the simulation of black holes and other extreme spacetimes to gain a better understanding of Relativity, and the physics of exotic objects in the distant cosmos.

The SXS project is supported by Canada Research Chairs, CFI, CIfAR, Compute Canada, Max Planck Society, NASA, NSERC, the NSF, Ontario MEDI, the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, and XSEDE.

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