On 10/21/2013 9:38 AM, Henry Baker wrote:
After looking at all the formulae re black holes, I have another question:
If you could somehow accelerate 2 approximately equal black holes in a counter-rotating ring like CERN and have them smash into one another, what would happen?
Interesting question. It could even be tried if we could make small, charged black holes.
I'm talking about _pure_ GR here, so I'm not concerned about all of the cascade of random particles that you'd get just from a high energy collision, but I'm interested in what happens to the black holes themselves.
I can think of 3 possibilities:
1. The black holes merge, producing one extremely fast rotating black hole.
Since the kinetic energy would go into the merged BH it would be a lot bigger than just the sum of the masses. There's a limit to how great the angular momentum can be so if the impact parameter was too great then you'd get something like 2 or 3, instead of a merged BH.
2. The black holes miss one another, but scatter elastically, generating a significant gravitational wave.
Of course the gravitational wave would carry away mass-energy, so the collision would not be elastic.
3. The black holes rip one another "apart" (whatever that means), producing a shower of smaller black holes.
I'm particularly interested if there are any solutions in GR of type 3.
I don't think so because that would imply a decrease in entropy. But that depends on the quasi-classical analysis of Beckenstein & Hawking, so it might well be wrong in the hoped for quantum theory of spacetime. Brent
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