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I am interested in the current state of knowledge of strong field General Relativity learned from numerical investigations of gravitational wave packets colliding with each other or black holes.

If someone can point to a good review article that is not paywalled, that would be wonderful, but in particular it would be great to know more about:

  • Has the formation of a black hole from collision of gravitational wave packets (localized, finite energy models) been seen in a simulation?
  • Can a sufficiently strong gravitational wave distort a blackhole violently enough that the scattering results in two black holes of smaller mass and gravitational radiation leaving?
  • Can two black holes scatter such that a third is formed?
BuddyJohn
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  • Regarding the second point, Hawking's area theorem states that the area of the horizon cannot increase, so it is not possible to form two smaller black holes from this process. However, it seems plausible that the wave could scatter off the black hole, and maybe extract some energy from the spin, and subsequently collapse into another black hole. – asperanz Feb 14 '16 at 19:11
  • @asperanz, good point (although, did you mean "cannot decrease"?) – BuddyJohn Feb 15 '16 at 01:05
  • Comments in this question link to a paper claiming black holes can scatter to create additional black holes. – BuddyJohn Feb 15 '16 at 01:07
  • Yes I meant cannot decrease, thanks! It looks like that paper was about collapsing gravitational waves to form new black holes. As long as the (total) horizon area does not decrease and horizons do not bifurcate (I.e. Split in two), the process is conceivably allowed. – asperanz Feb 15 '16 at 04:52

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