2007/11/30 by Carlos O. Lousto, C. O. Loustó, Yosef Zlochower · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #astro-ph #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.77.024034
published as Phys.Rev.D77:024034,2008 · Revtex 4, 13 pages, 15 figures
openalex publication_date 2008/01/22 · arxiv created 2008/03/03 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
We present techniques for long-term, stable, and accurate evolutions of multiple-black-hole spacetimes using the ``moving puncture'' approach with fourth- and eighth-order finite-difference stencils. We use these techniques to explore configurations of three black holes in a hierarchical system consisting of a third black hole approaching a quasicircular black-hole binary, and find that, depending on the size of the binary, the resulting encounter may lead to a prompt merger of all three black holes, production of a highly elliptical binary (with the third black hole remaining unbound), or disruption of the binary (leading to three free black holes). We also analyze the classical Burrau three-body problem using full numerical evolutions. In both cases, we find behaviors distinctly different from Newtonian predictions, which has important implications for N-body black-hole simulations. For our simulations we use approximate analytic initial data. We find that the eighth-order stencils significantly reduce the numerical errors for our choice of grid sizes, and that the approximate initial data produces the expected waveforms for black-hole binaries with modest initial separations.