Gravitational radiation driven capture in unequal mass black hole encounters

Abstract

The gravitational radiation driven capture (GR capture) between unequal mass black holes without spins has been investigated with numerical relativistic simulations. We adopt the parabolic approximation which assumes that the gravitational wave radiation from a weakly hyperbolic orbit is the same as that from the parabolic orbit having the same pericenter distance. Using the radiated energies from the parabolic orbit simulations, we have obtained the critical impact parameter (bcrit) for the GR capture for weakly hyperbolic orbit as a function of initial energy. The most energetic encounters occur around the boundary between the direct merging and the fly-by orbits, and can emit several percent of total initial energy at the peak. When the total mass is fixed, energy and angular momentum radiated in the case of unequal mass black holes are smaller than those of equal mass black holes having the same initial orbital angular momentum for the fly-by orbits. We have compared our results with two different post-Newtonian (PN) approximations, the exact parabolic orbit (EPO) and PN corrected orbit (PNCO). We find that the agreement between the EPO and the numerical relativity breaks down for very close encounters (e.g., bcrit100 M), and it becomes worse for higher mass ratios. For instance, the critical impact parameters can differ by more than 50% from those obtained in EPO if the relative velocity at infinity v is larger than 0.1 for the mass ratio of m1/m2=16. The PNCO gives more consistent results than EPO, but it also underestimates the critical impact parameter for the GR capture at bcrit40 M. © 2017 American Physical Society.