Black holes, Mass, volume, etc.

[Saul Goodman]

One would have thought so. If not, where did that energy go? (and by 'energy', I also mean mass)

Ask him that. Ask him questions!

I don't know the answer, but that is not a stupid question.

That was exactly my question, and the point at which I chose to ask him to qualify his argument... Which also happened to coincide with the point at which he chose to call me an uneducated dickhead and hung up.

 

[Saul Goodman]

OP- are you from Newcastle?

I ask because one of the most genuinely brilliant things I've ever seen in a pub was in Newcastle a couple of weeks ago. Two blokes had to be physically held back from each other due to an argument over quantum mechanics

No, but I see your point and bow down to it

 

[Signal 11]

His argument was that if two black holes collide, they lose both gravitational force, and mass. I argued that mass is a constant, and although there would probably be a loss in volume, the mass of the two systems would be the mass of system 1 + the mass of system 2

He's right:

physicists have concluded that these gravitational waves were produced during the final moments of the merger of two black holes—14 and 8 times the mass of the sun—to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole that is 21 times the mass of the sun
[...]
During the merger, which occurred approximately 1.4 billion years ago, a quantity of energy roughly equivalent to the mass of the sun was converted into gravitational waves.

http://phys.org/news/2016-06-gravitational-pair-colliding-black-holes.html

 

[Saul Goodman]

He's right:


http://phys.org/news/2016-06-gravitational-pair-colliding-black-holes.html

I need to look into that... Thanks for the link.

 

[2hats]

When binary black holes collide the mass of the single resulting black hole is less than the mass of the two original black holes as some (typically a fraction of one percent) is lost as energy in the form of gravitational waves during the post-merger ringdown phase. LIGO observed this as well as the gravitational waves arising from the pre-merger inspiral phase (loss of orbital angular momentum).

With the birth of a new era of observational astronomy - gravitational wave astronomy - this particular field is undergoing rapid evolution as theory attempts to keep up with observations.