How do black holes merge ?

[whacky]

............ how ?

[andrewas]

What do you need to know?

They collide, and form a single black hole with their combined mass & vector. I dunno how rotation works out. What happens to the singularities themselves is not important, I think they combine as well but since they are inside the event horizon, and therefore are unmeasurable and irrelevant to the outside universe.

[Timber Loftis]

The slow down, check their rear-view and side mirrors, and gently ease into the open lane.

[edit:] First they activate the blinker in the desired direction of their merge. Sorry, almost forgot.

[ 12-04-2002, 09:40 AM: Message edited by: Timber Loftis ]

[Thoran]

Unless they're New York black holes, in which case they look to make sure there's at least .5 nanometers of extra room between cars in the other lane then quickly and erratically swerve over before the trailing car can agressively close up the gap (which he will automatically try to do once he sees the manuver start). If successful the black hole will then immediately slow down to 10mph under the speed limit and glory in the angry honking coming from behind, if unsuccessful the black hole will give the blocking car the finger which they won't see because... IT'S A BLACK HOLE!

I would tend to think that two black holes merging will work roughly the same as any large mass being swallowed, the resulting black hole will be the combined mass, the event horizon will shift appropriately, the spin and vector will be based on the two inputs... and you won't see ANY of the action.

[whacky]

Originally posted by Thoran: I would tend to think that two black holes merging will work roughly the same as any large mass being swallowed, the resulting black hole will be the combined mass, the event horizon will shift appropriately, the spin and vector will be based on the two inputs... and you won't see ANY of the action.

Perhaps you are missing the very interesting gravitational wave factor ..... [img]smile.gif[/img]
IIRC its sad you cant measure them .....

[Morgeruat]

intersting question and here's somethign similar I found while surfing http://chandra.harvard.edu/

[RevRuby]

i always heard it happened when you put one bag of holding into another.

[T/-/alali]

Wouldnt the bigger one just suck the other one up???

Well I guess you cant suck up a black hole HUH?

Maybe they colide at high speeds and get mushed together.

[/)eathKiller]

It's like this

You take the tiniest most central point known in existance and then you bop another point into it while they both are being surrounded with infinate gravity, Then you get a Nuclear shockwave in space but on a Super Atomic Scale, So tiny the the particles themselves Create a shockwave which washes over everything and runs through space because it is of gravity itself! it may very well swallow up the solar system! or just push it around a bit, either way, by the time the gravitational effects reach earth it will have been hit by a few meteors and struck byt he sun anway and shortly after that Andromida would ram into us too [img]tongue.gif[/img]

ALL IS LOST!

we're doomed we're doomed we're doomed we're doomed we're doomed we're doomed !!!!

Oh well!

[Scholarcs]

Originally posted by andrewas: What do you need to know? They collide, and form a single black hole with their combined mass & vector. I dunno how rotation works out. What happens to the singularities themselves is not important, I think they combine as well but since they are inside the event horizon, and therefore are unmeasurable and irrelevant to the outside universe.

This sounds about right. Pretty much everything interesting that happens wont be able to be seen because of the event horizon.