What Happens to Apparent Horizons in a Binary Black Hole Merger?

Abstract

We resolve the fate of the two original apparent horizons during the head-on merger of two non-spinning black holes. We show that following the appearance of the outer common horizon and subsequent inter-penetration of the original horizons, they continue to exist for a finite period of time before they are individually annihilated by unstable MOTSs. The inner common horizon vanishes in a similar, though independent, way. This completes the understanding of the analogue of the event horizon's "pair of pants" diagram for the apparent horizon. Our result is facilitated by a new method for locating marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTSs) based on a generalized shooting method. We also discuss the role played by the MOTS stability operator in discerning which among a multitude of MOTSs should be considered as black hole boundaries.

6 pages, 5 figures, V2: final version with several changes (including changed title)

References in corpus (5)

• Understanding the "anti-kick" in the merger of binary black holes
• The time evolution of marginally trapped surfaces
• Ultimate fate of apparent horizons during a binary black hole merger II: Horizons weaving back and forth in time
• MOTS in Schwarzschild: multiple self-intersections and extreme mass ratio mergers
• Fundamental properties and applications of quasi-local black hole horizons

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Ultimate fate of apparent horizons during a binary black hole merger II: Horizons weaving back and forth in time
• Tidal deformation of dynamical horizons in binary black hole mergers
• Quasi-Local Black Hole Horizons: Recent Advances
• Symmetry and instability of marginally outer trapped surfaces
• Extreme Gravitational Interactions in the Problem of Three Black Holes in General Relativity
• Exotic marginally outer trapped surfaces in rotating spacetimes of any dimension
• Properties of Quasi-local mass in binary black hole mergers
• Marginally Outer Trapped Tori in Black Hole Spacetimes
• On the existence of conformal Killing horizons in LRS spacetimes
• Ultimate fate of apparent horizons during a binary black hole merger I: Locating and understanding axisymmetric marginally outer trapped surfaces
• Dynamical Horizon Segments and Spacetime Isometries
• Revisiting the apparent horizon finding problem with multigrid methods
• Entangled universes
• The Interior MOTSs of Spherically Symmetric Black Holes
• Black holes and their horizons in semiclassical and modified theories of gravity