Deformation of horizons during a merger

Understand

We model an extreme mass ratio merger (EMR) as a point particle radially plunging into a large Schwarzschild black hole.

• We assume that the mass of the point particle, $\mu$, is much smaller than the black hole mass M.
• Under this assumption we can employ the Zerilli formalism modified to include a source term which arises from the energy-momentum tensor of the small object.
• We solve the Zerilli equation by numerically evolving initial data.