[ExI] black biggies

[John Clark]

On Mon, Sep 7, 2020 at 5:40 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:


> > *From my understanding of it, the way big mergers happen is when two
> stars destined to merge originally formed, they had to be in pairs where
> they were gravitationally bound, but also had a close approach point.  This
> bled off an enormous amount of angular momentum at each mutual perihelion,
> eventually causing a the two to merge, forming Mister 85.  But if we
> initially had three, I don’t understand how the merger could have set up
> conditions likely to get a subsequent merger of Mister 66. I am struggling
> to imagine two pairs each pair tightly bound to start with, and each of the
> pairs in a highly-elliptical orbit that close-approaches the other pair,
> with all four of the original stars being monsters.  Oh that staggers the
> imagination.*
>

I'm struggling to understand how that could be too. Another problem is that
all this seems to have happened less than 1 billion years after the Big
Bang and it takes a great deal of time for two orbiting black holes to
bleed off enough angular momentum in the form of gravity waves for them to
merge, and there just doesn't seem to be enough time for that. But I guess
we shouldn't be surprised that we don't understand how so much matter could
be concentrated in such a small space so fast when we don't have the
slightest idea of what dark matter is and it's about five times as common
as regular matter.
>
> *> Note: LIGO just turned on the past 5 yrs.  We have gotten alllll
> thiiiiis in just the last 5 years, good new science out the old wazoo.*
>
Five years ago I would have said LIGO has been in operation for years and
has found nothing and was turning into a boondoggle, boy was I wrong! They
had a major upgrade that increased sensitivity and opened a new window into
the universe and we saw all these wonders. It's just great!

 John K Clark
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