When black holes do-si-do, one massive partner spins heels over head until the merger is complete, said researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in a paper published in Physical Review Letters.
This spin dynamic may affect the growth of black holes surrounded by accretion disks and alter galactic and supermassive binary black holes, leading to observational effects, according to RIT scientists Carlos Lousto and James Healy.
The authors of the study will present their findings at the American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore on April 14 in celebration of the centennial of general relativity.
"We study binary spinning black holes to display the long-term individual spin dynamics," said Lousto, professor in RIT's School of Mathematical Sciences and a member of the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation, according to the press release.
"Lousto and Healy's simulation is one of the longest ever attempted for spinning black hole binaries," said Pedro Marronetti, National Science Foundation physics division program director, according to the press release. "Their results and potential observational effects will impact research in a wide range of areas, from gravitational physics to galactic evolution and cosmology."
Key to their findings is that one black hole in the simulation totally changes the orientation of its spin. Its initial alignment with the orbital angular momentum changes to a complete anti-alignment after half of a flip-flop cycle, Lousto said.
"We show that this process continuously flip-flops the spin during the lifetime of the binary until merger," Lousto said, according to the press release.
Reference:
"Flip-Flopping Binary Black Holes," Carlos O. Lousto and James Healy, Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 141101, 6 April 2015 [https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.141101, preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.3830].
To watch the black hole simulations "tango," click here for a short animation set to "Invierno Porteño" by Argentine tango composer Ástor Piazzolla.
