Gravity-dominated unequal-mass black hole collisions

Abstract

We continue our series of studies of high-energy collisions of black holes investigating unequal-mass, boosted head-on collisions in four dimensions. We show that the fraction of the center-of-mass energy radiated as gravitational waves becomes independent of mass ratio and approximately equal to 13% at large energies. We support this conclusion with calculations using black hole perturbation theory and Smarr’s zero-frequency limit approximation. These results lend strong support to the conjecture that the detailed structure of the colliding objects is irrelevant at high energies.