TY - JOUR

T1 - News from Horizons in Binary Black Hole Mergers

AU - Prasad, Vaishak

AU - Gupta, Anshu

AU - Bose, Sukanta

AU - Krishnan, Badri

AU - Schnetter, Erik

N1 - Funding Information: We are grateful to Abhay Ashtekar, Ivan Booth, Scott Hughes, and Jose-Luis Jaramillo for valuable discussions. Research at Perimeter Institute is supported in part by the Government of Canada through the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Colleges and Universities. A. G. is supported, in part, by the Navajbai Ratan Tata Trust research grant. V. P. is funded by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee fellowship (CSIR). The numerical simulations and other computations were performed on the high performance supercomputers Perseus and Pegasus at IUCAA. This document has been assigned the LIGO Preprint number LIGO-P2000098.

PY - 2020/9/16

Y1 - 2020/9/16

N2 - In a binary black hole merger, it is known that the inspiral portion of the waveform corresponds to two distinct horizons orbiting each other and that the merger and ringdown signals correspond to the final horizon being formed and settling down to equilibrium. However, we still lack a detailed understanding of the relation between the horizon geometry in these three regimes and the observed waveform. Here we show that the well-known inspiral chirp waveform has a clear counterpart on black hole horizons, namely, the shear of the outgoing null rays at the horizon. We demonstrate that the shear behaves very much like a compact binary coalescence waveform with increasing frequency and amplitude. Furthermore, the parameters of the system estimated from the horizon agree with those estimated from the waveform. This implies that even though black hole horizons are causally disconnected from us, assuming general relativity to be true, we can potentially infer some of their detailed properties from gravitational wave observations.

AB - In a binary black hole merger, it is known that the inspiral portion of the waveform corresponds to two distinct horizons orbiting each other and that the merger and ringdown signals correspond to the final horizon being formed and settling down to equilibrium. However, we still lack a detailed understanding of the relation between the horizon geometry in these three regimes and the observed waveform. Here we show that the well-known inspiral chirp waveform has a clear counterpart on black hole horizons, namely, the shear of the outgoing null rays at the horizon. We demonstrate that the shear behaves very much like a compact binary coalescence waveform with increasing frequency and amplitude. Furthermore, the parameters of the system estimated from the horizon agree with those estimated from the waveform. This implies that even though black hole horizons are causally disconnected from us, assuming general relativity to be true, we can potentially infer some of their detailed properties from gravitational wave observations.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85092324521&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.48550/arXiv.2003.06215

DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2003.06215

M3 - Article

C2 - 33016749

AN - SCOPUS:85092324521

VL - 125

JO - Physical review letters

JF - Physical review letters

SN - 0031-9007

IS - 12

M1 - 121101

ER -