Supermassive black hole eating a stellar black hole

[Joshua Guyette]

I'm trying to visualize what a fast spinning supermassive black hole slowly eating a stellar black hole should "look" like; how would the mass flow between the two? Could enough mass be removed from the stellar black hole, that it loses it's event horizon before entering the supermassive black hole's event horizon?

Everytime I see visual examples, it's always two black holes of equal mass; where they just tear-drop together. Prefer a visually wordy description, but you can definitely throw some math at me. :)

 

[PAllen]

This is actually the much simpler case than equal mass mergers. It was thus calculated many years earlier, and is subject to much less recent research. The point is that the small BH can be treated effectively as a perturbation to the metric of the large BH.

No, there is no possibility of 'loss of event horizon'. The phenomenology is that same as the equal mass case, except that one BH is small, so you can readily imagine what happens looking at a recent equal mass video realization.

Here is an assortment of treatments of this case (called "extreme mass ratio inspiral" in the literature; this is what will get you lots of hits in a search):

https://www.black-holes.org/the-science-compact-objects/compact-objects/extreme-mass-ratio-inspirals
https://astrobites.org/2018/07/05/small-black-hole-meets-big-black-hole/
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/56556
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct...3/032001/pdf&usg=AOvVaw0mU0Zp6u58CuGlnzgUHpDU

 

[Joshua Guyette]

The first link's first picture shows this nicely. Thanks for the resources, I look forward to reading them. :)