In the news I noticed a news story about LIGO (& VIRGO) detecting a very large black hole collision, resulting in an intermediate-mass black hole of 142 solar masses.
The Black Holes that collided were said to have 85 solar masses and 66 solar masses, making their combined mass 151 solar solar masses. And nine solar masses were converted directly into energy, in the form of gravitational waves, spreading across galaxies to be detected by some smart monkeys seven billion years later.
Now, purely aside from the fact that that's a staggering amount of energy to be released all at once, in any form, it is equally staggering, to me at least, that that energy came directly from inside these colliding black holes. Nine solar masses worth of matter/energy once contained inside these event horizons, is now outside these event horizons. The containment of the event horizon somehow failed.
And this failure is something we already know about. We have documented a lot of cases in which up to 5% of the matter being combined is lost as energy.
The spacetime contingent on a rotating gravitational field is also, to some extent, rotating. And we have a chaotic situation here because there are three possible rotations to consider. Each of the BH's individually, and the field generated mutually by their orbit around one another. There are cases where this can result in 'anisotropic emission of gravitational radiation' which sure as heck sounds like some kind of potentially detectable force. How much do we imagine there might be? Do these 'anisotropic emissions' have any large-scale expected statistical effect on the expansion of space or the rotation of galaxies?
We know that the combined area of the event horizons must never decrease in a collision, but surface-area-to-mass ratios being what they are, that doesn't mean the combined mass can never decrease.
Here's another thought; Since black hole mergers release staggering amounts of energy in the form of gravitational radiation, doesn't this energy, like the electromagnetic energy traversing a region, become a form of 'mass' for purposes of measuring the mass density of that region? IOW, isn't every attempt to account for the mass of a galaxy going to come up short if it doesn't account for the energy (at e=mc^2) of the electromagnetic and gravitational radiation traversing that galaxy? I've seen models that try to estimate the total electromagnetic energy; I don't think I've ever seen one that tries to estimate the total Gravity-wave energy.
I don't suppose it accounts for the entirety of "missing matter" that gives rise to the Dark Matter theory; it's just that Dark Matter is a kind of modern phlogiston - implied by our model but never confirmed to exist - and I feel like we really need to account for *EVERYTHING* before we resort to such desperate measures as something we've never directly detected except by the one phenomenon for which we invoke it as explanation, because it may turn out that our model's just wrong.
The Black Holes that collided were said to have 85 solar masses and 66 solar masses, making their combined mass 151 solar solar masses. And nine solar masses were converted directly into energy, in the form of gravitational waves, spreading across galaxies to be detected by some smart monkeys seven billion years later.
Now, purely aside from the fact that that's a staggering amount of energy to be released all at once, in any form, it is equally staggering, to me at least, that that energy came directly from inside these colliding black holes. Nine solar masses worth of matter/energy once contained inside these event horizons, is now outside these event horizons. The containment of the event horizon somehow failed.
And this failure is something we already know about. We have documented a lot of cases in which up to 5% of the matter being combined is lost as energy.
The spacetime contingent on a rotating gravitational field is also, to some extent, rotating. And we have a chaotic situation here because there are three possible rotations to consider. Each of the BH's individually, and the field generated mutually by their orbit around one another. There are cases where this can result in 'anisotropic emission of gravitational radiation' which sure as heck sounds like some kind of potentially detectable force. How much do we imagine there might be? Do these 'anisotropic emissions' have any large-scale expected statistical effect on the expansion of space or the rotation of galaxies?
We know that the combined area of the event horizons must never decrease in a collision, but surface-area-to-mass ratios being what they are, that doesn't mean the combined mass can never decrease.
Here's another thought; Since black hole mergers release staggering amounts of energy in the form of gravitational radiation, doesn't this energy, like the electromagnetic energy traversing a region, become a form of 'mass' for purposes of measuring the mass density of that region? IOW, isn't every attempt to account for the mass of a galaxy going to come up short if it doesn't account for the energy (at e=mc^2) of the electromagnetic and gravitational radiation traversing that galaxy? I've seen models that try to estimate the total electromagnetic energy; I don't think I've ever seen one that tries to estimate the total Gravity-wave energy.
I don't suppose it accounts for the entirety of "missing matter" that gives rise to the Dark Matter theory; it's just that Dark Matter is a kind of modern phlogiston - implied by our model but never confirmed to exist - and I feel like we really need to account for *EVERYTHING* before we resort to such desperate measures as something we've never directly detected except by the one phenomenon for which we invoke it as explanation, because it may turn out that our model's just wrong.