Gravitational radiation from spinning-black-hole binaries: The orbital hang up
Abstract
We study the dynamics of spinning-black-hole binaries by numerically solving the full nonlinear field equations of General Relativity. We compute trajectories, merger times, and radiation waveforms. We find that the last stages of the orbital motion of black-hole binaries are profoundly affected by the individual spins. In order to cleanly display its effects, we consider two equal mass holes with individual spin parameters S/m^2=0.75, both aligned and anti-aligned with the orbital angular momentum. We choose initial data corresponding to quasicircular orbits with a period of 125M for both cases. The computed merger time for the aligned spin case is ~225M, performing nearly three orbits before merger, while for the anti-aligned case the merger time is \~105M, performing just less than one orbit before merger. The total energy radiated for the former case is ~6% while for the latter it is only ~2%. The final Kerr hole remnants have rotation parameters a/M=0.9 and a/M=0.44 respectively, showing the difficulty of creating a maximally rotating black hole out of the merger of two spinning holes.Keywords
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