BINARY BLACK HOLE

A binary black hole is a system consisting of two black holes in close orbit around each other. Like black holes themselves, binary black holes are often divided into stellar binary black holes, formed either as remnants of high-mass binary star systems or by dynamic processes and mutual capture, and binary supermassive black holes believed to be a result of galactic mergers.

For many years, proving the existence of binary black holes was made difficult because of the nature of black holes themselves, and the limited means of detection available. However, in the event that a pair of black holes were to merge, an immense amount of energy should be given off as gravitational waves, with distinctive waveforms that can be calculated using general relativity.

Therefore, during the late 20th and early 21st century, binary black holes became of great interest scientifically as a potential source of such waves, and a means by which gravitational waves could be proven to exist.

Binary black hole mergers would be one of the strongest known sources of gravitational waves in the Universe, and thus offer a good chance of directly detecting such waves. As the orbiting black holes give off these waves, the orbit decays, and the orbital period decreases. This stage is called binary black hole inspiral.

The black holes will merge once they are close enough. Once merged, the single hole settles down to a stable form, via a stage called ringdown, where any distortion in the shape is dissipated as more gravitational waves. In the final fraction of a second the black holes can reach extremely high velocity, and the gravitational wave amplitude reaches its peak.

An unexpected result can occur with binary black holes that merge, in that the gravitational waves carry momentum and the merging black-hole pair accelerates seemingly violating Newton’s third law. The center of gravity can add over 1000 km/s of kick velocity. The greatest kick velocities (approaching 5000 km/s) occur for equal-mass and equal-spin-magnitude black-hole binaries, when the spins directions are optimally oriented to be counter-aligned, parallel to the orbital plane or nearly aligned with the orbital angular momentum. This is enough to escape large galaxies.

With more likely orientations a smaller effect takes place, perhaps only a few hundred kilometers per second. This sort of speed will eject merging binary black holes from globular clusters, thus preventing the formation of massive black holes in globular cluster cores.

The existence of stellar-mass binary black holes (and gravitational waves themselves) was finally confirmed when LIGO detected GW150914 (detected September 2015) a distinctive gravitational wave signature of two merging stellar-mass black holes of around 30 solar masses each, occurring about 1.3 billion light years away.

In its final 20 ms of spiraling inward and merging, GW150914 released around 3 solar masses as gravitational energy, peaking at a rate of 3.6×1049 watts — more than the combined power of all light radiated by all the stars in the observable universe put together. Supermassive binary black hole candidates have been found, but not yet categorically proven.

It has been hypothesized that binary black holes could transfer energy and momentum to a spacecraft using a “halo drive”, exploiting the holographic reflection created by a set of null geodesics looping behind and then around one of the black holes before returning to the spacecraft.

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