[ExI] ligo numbers

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Wed Oct 4 17:24:46 UTC 2017


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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