[ExI] ligo numbers

[spike]

I had an idea upon which John or the other astronomy hipsters might comment.

 

I noticed the masses of the merging black holes seemed to be remarkably even
with each other, within a factor of 2:

 

First event, masses of 29 and 35

Second event, masses of 8 and 14

Third event, masses of 19 and 31

Fourth event, masses of 25 and 30

 

Today a notion occurred to me: there is a reason why this might not be just
a crazy coincidence or a characteristic of the LIGO instrument to detect
only a certain class of mergers.

 

Consider any two black holes locked into mutual orbit.  Always the smaller
hole goes into a bigger orbit, so it travels faster and traverses more
space.  The pair attracts stuff, so gas and perhaps stars are devoured, but
always the smaller black hole grows faster because of covering more ground:
anything that falls inward toward the pair has a higher chance of being
gobbled by the smaller black hole.

 

This might explain why the four observations seen so far are mergers between
black holes of almost the same mass.

 

spike

 

 

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