Published May 6, 2011 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Horizon dynamics of distorted rotating black holes

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics

Abstract

We present numerical simulations of a rotating black hole distorted by a pulse of ingoing gravitational radiation. For strong pulses, we find up to five concentric marginally outer trapped surfaces. These trapped surfaces appear and disappear in pairs, so that the total number of such surfaces at any given time is odd. The world tubes traced out by the marginally outer trapped surfaces are found to be spacelike during the highly dynamical regime, approaching a null hypersurface at early and late times. We analyze the structure of these marginally trapped tubes in the context of the dynamical horizon formalism, computing the expansion of outgoing and incoming null geodesics, as well as evaluating the dynamical horizon flux law and the angular momentum flux law. Finally, we compute the event horizon. The event horizon is well-behaved and approaches the apparent horizon before and after the highly dynamical regime. No new generators enter the event horizon during the simulation.

Additional Information

© 2011 American Physical Society. Received 11 November 2010; published 6 May 2011. We thank Ivan Booth, Yanbei Chen, Stephen Fairhurst, and Lee Lindblom for useful discussions. We are especially grateful to Mark A. Scheel and Keith D. Matthews for discussions related to the evaluation of the flux laws. Calculations have been performed using the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC) [33]. This research was supported in part by grants from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and the Brinson Foundation to Caltech and by NSF Grants No. PHY-0601459 and No. PHY-1005655 and NASA Grant No. NNX09AF97G at Caltech. H. P. gratefully acknowledges support from the NSERC of Canada, from the Canada Research Chairs Program, and from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Attached Files

Published - Chu2011p13885Phys_Rev_D.pdf

Files

Chu2011p13885Phys_Rev_D.pdf

Files (1.0 MB)

Name Size
md5:af8a15e0f18e0c16ba118fb01233287a
1.0 MB Preview Download

Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
23749
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20110520-104357160

Funding

Sherman Fairchild Foundation
Brinson Foundation
NSF
PHY-0601459
NSF
PHY-1005655
NASA
NNX09AF97G
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
Canada Research Chairs Program
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR)

Dates

Created
2011-06-20
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-09
Created from EPrint's last_modified field