When Black Holes Collide
Peter Anninos, David Hobill, Edward Seidel, Larry Smarr, and Wai-Mo Suen, in Proceedings of the Sixth Canadian Conference on General Relativity and Relativistic Astrophysics, Fields Institute Communications (1997).
Abstract
The head-on collision of two nonrotating axisymmetric equal mass black holes is treated numerically using Misner’s time-symmetric initial data where the two holes are represented by Einstein-Rosen bridges that can be placed arbitrarily distant from one another. We have extracted both L = 2 and L = 4 gravitational waveforms resulting from the collision. The normal modes of the final black hole dominate the spectrum in all cases studied. The total energy radiated is computed using several independent methods, and is typically less than 0.002M.