Colliding black holes: The close limit

The problem of the mutual attraction and joining of two black holes is of importance as both a source of gravitational waves and as a testbed of numerical relativity. If the holes start out close enough that they are initially surrounded by a common horizon, the problem can be viewed as a perturbation of a single black hole. We take initial data due to Misner for close black holes, apply perturbation theory, and evolve the data with the Zerilli equation. The computed gravitational radiation agrees with and extends the results of full numerical computations.