What happens to the inertia of a mass falling into a black hole?

[PeterDonis]

I don't see why this should vanish.

I was mistaken. See my response to @PAllen in post #25.

 

[pervect]

I was mistaken. See my response to @PAllen in post #25.

I did see those posts - after I made my reply, so it came out awkwards. I did find another term in addition to the third time derivative of acceleration , though, which I thought was interesting. It may tie into MTW"s "power flow" idea, that I mentioned in a different post, since mass*velocity*acceleration would represent power. That would only apply to the first term I found, though - I'm not sure how one could justify ignoring the second term, the one proportional to the third time derivative of acceleration.

The advantage of tying gravitational radiation to power flow rather than the quadrupole formula is that it's easier to communicate to the lay audience. While I can cite the appropriate reference from MTW, it's clear that they were making some assumptions in their derivation, so it's not clear how general their formula is and that makes me hesitant to present it to the lay audience who frequently wants to analyze somewhat novel scenarios.

Another minor concern is that since we do apparently have gravitational waves being emitted, to get an accurate figure for the amount of radiation emitted we need to be concerned about back reaction forces modifying the trajectory, as was done on the Hulse-Taylor binary. For the benefit of those who may not be familiar with this (I'm sure Peter is, this is for the benefit of other readers who hopefully haven't been scared off), the observation of the decay of the orbital period of this binary won the Nobel prize for it's agreement with the calculations done by General relativity. <<link>>.

Going back to the original poster's problem, while I don't have any detailed calculations I would think that the gravitational radiation would be axis-symmetric, so I don't think it would carry momentum away from the system in the center-of-mass frame. This however, is an intuition, not a hard calculation.

Assuming this is correct, what I'd expect to happen is that the black hole and the infalling star would merge into one larger black hole, but, as in the inspiral cases that Ligo analyzes, the mass of the resulting black hole would be lower than the sum of the initial black hole mass and the star mass, the difference being carried away by the emitted gravitational waves.

 

[KurtLudwig]

I defer to your knowledge.
Some extreme topics in physics are even stranger than I thought.
I believe that software modelling will be become an important tool in cosmology.
Thank you for your explanations.

 

[Lars278]

What happens to the inertia of a mass falling into a black hole? I am not even sure if I frame the questions correctly. Will this mass reach the center or is mass distributed within the black hole? Is the singularity the whole volume of the black hole or is it a point in the center? If a large star falls into a medium-sized black hole, will the black hole move towards the star, due to gravitational attraction, or will the impact move the black hole away, due to the inertia of the star?

1. The mass will be concentrated at the singularity. 2. Simple Newtonian mechanics apply. If the mass of the black hole is a million times the mass of the star, the black hole will hardly move at all. If it's three times the mass of the star it will move substantially.

 

[PAllen]

Please note the end of my post #3. It is a much more complete answer to BH star interaction than the last few posts. If needed, I can provide technical references.

 

[PeterDonis]

The OP question has been answered. Thread closed.