[ExI] ligo numbers

[John Clark]

I said

"until LIGO nobody had ever detected 2 Black Holes in orbit around each
other"

Now that I think about it that's not quite true, 4 or 5 were discovered by
X rays but they were all of the supermassive type of billions of solar
masses.

John K Clark


On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 1:24 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 12:53 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>
> ​But there can't be much stuff falling into either Black Hole, if there
> were they'd be producing powerful X rays and they would have been seen
> years ago, but until ​LIGO nobody had ever detected 2 Black Holes in orbit
> around each other. That's really not surprising, those Black Holes are old
> and the dusty cloud that made the original stars (assuming those Black
> Holes came from stars) would be long gone by now. And if the Black Holes
> are primordial there would be even less reason to think they are now in a
> crowded part of the universe where lots of things can fall in.
>
> Also if a Black Hole is much larger than about 100 solar masses the
> frequency of the
> gravitational
> waves will be too low for LIGO to detect.
>
> ​ John K Clark ​
>
>
>
>
>
>
>>
>>
>>
>> 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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>>
>>
>
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