Tuesday, December 04, 2012

[igywyccl] Galaxy collisions ejecting black holes

Given some galaxies, compute the probability that a supermassive black hole will be ejected and orphaned as a result of a galaxy collision, probably a multiple galaxy collision.

Such orphaned black holes, floating invisibly through intergalactic space but attracted to large conglomerations of matter such as other galaxies, are the stuff nightmares are made of.  How invisible are they?  The motivation is to estimate how many there are.

Interacting black holes can dissipate gravitational potential energy via gravitational waves, so there will be fewer ejections and more mergers than Newtonian gravitational modeling.

Update: Hypercompact stellar system

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