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LIGO detects most massive black hole merger to date

(www.caltech.edu)
360 points Eduard | 1 comments | 14 Jul 25 20:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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BurningFrog ◴[14 Jul 25 21:40 UTC] No.44565671[source]▶
I've always thought the event horizon for a black hole has to be spherical.

But my physics intuition tells me that as two of them merge, the resulting BH should have a "peanut" shape, at least initially.

And maybe it can keep having an irregular shape, depending on the mass distribution inside it?

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1. fpoling ◴[15 Jul 25 14:30 UTC] No.44571532[source]▶
From our perspective there is no event horizon since the collapsing star has not reached the black hole state. In fact it takes infinite amount of time from the point of view of an external observer for the event horizon to form.

In almost all situations it does matter as the collapsing star will behave as it is a black hole. But for the merge of black holes it is significant as it allows to release energy as there is no event horizon.