'David and Goliath' Black Hole Clashes Analyzed

Just a few years ago they said it couldn't be done, but now astrophysicists have succeeded in simulating the most extreme collision of two black holes yet: one black hole a hundred times more massive than the other. The accomplishment comes after simulations had pushed from one-to-one mass collisions five years ago all the way up to ten to one mass mergers.

"When two black holes collide in realistic astrophysical scenarios, they don't have the same size," said Carlos Lousto of the Rochester Institute of Technology's (RIT) Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation.

Colliding galaxies would be the sort of scenario in which black holes of very different masses -- everything from two-to-one up to a million-to-one -- would fall into each other as they leak massive amounts of orbital energy by emitting gravitational waves.

Until now simulations had succeeded reproducing black hole collisions up to a 10-to-one mass ratio and reached the limits of those techniques, said Lousto. Going further seemed like something that would take five to 10 years to solve. But that was before researchers met in Canada last summer and came up with some new techniques.

"In a few months we came up with a solution," Lousto told Discovery News. "We think we can go beyond this mass ratio, maybe to a thousand-to-one."

"This is such a complex problem," said Lousto. "It had to be solved by supercomputers. We needed really large resources."

In fact, it took the 70,000-processor supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center nearly three months to complete the simulation.

Read more at Discovery News