Talk Title: How black holes get their kicks: radiation recoil in binary black hole mergers
Abstract: Gravitational waves from the coalescence of binary black holes carry away linear momentum, causing center of mass recoil. This ``radiation rocket'' has important implications for systems with escape speeds of order the recoil velocity. In this talk, I will describe new calculations of the recoil that use high precision black hole perturbation theory to estimate the magnitude of the final recoil velocity. We find that the recoil has a strong dependence on the binary's parameters - particularly mass ratio, spin of the larger hole, and inclination angle - but that velocities of a few hundred km/sec can be achieved fairly easily.
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