What Happens to Apparent Horizons in a Binary Black Hole Merger?
Abstract
We resolve the fate of the two original apparent horizons during the head-on merger of two non-spinning black holes. We show that following the appearance of the outer common horizon and subsequent inter-penetration of the original horizons, they continue to exist for a finite period of time before they are individually annihilated by unstable MOTSs. The inner common horizon vanishes in a similar, though independent, way. This completes the understanding of the analogue of the event horizon's "pair of pants" diagram for the apparent horizon. Our result is facilitated by a new method for locating marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTSs) based on a generalized shooting method. We also discuss the role played by the MOTS stability operator in discerning which among a multitude of MOTSs should be considered as black hole boundaries.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2104.10265,
title = {What Happens to Apparent Horizons in a Binary Black Hole Merger?},
author = {Daniel Pook-Kolb and Robie A. Hennigar and Ivan Booth},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.10265},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
6 pages, 5 figures, V2: final version with several changes (including changed title)