The Asymmetric Merger of Black Holes

We study event horizons of non-axisymmetric black holes and show how features found in axisymmetric studies of colliding black holes and of toroidal black holes are non-generic and how new features emerge. Most of the details of black hole formation and black hole merger are known only in the axisymmetric case, in which numerical evolution has successfully produced dynamical space-times. The work that is presented here uses a new approach to construct the geometry of the event horizon, not by locating it in a given spacetime, but by direct construction. In the axisymmetric case, our method produces the familiar pair-of-pants structure found in previous numerical simulations of black hole mergers, as well as event horizons that go through a toroidal epoch as discovered in the collapse of rotating matter. The main purpose of this paper is to show how new – substantially different – features emerge in the non-axisymmetric case. In particular, we show how black holes generically go through a toroidal phase before they become spherical, and how this fits together with the merger of black holes. 04.20Ex, 04.25Dm, 04.25Nx, 04.70Bw Typeset using REVTEX