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arXiv · 2608.26203

Crudely Estimated Maximum Mass for a Cosmological Black Hole

Don N. Page
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Abstract

$N$-body simulations by M.~Milosavljevic and D.~Merritt \cite{Milosavljevic:2001vi} suggest that for supermassive black hole binaries in their expected nearly circular orbits, before gravitational wave emission dominates, the inspiral rate causes the dimensionless orbital relative velocity squared, $(v/c)^2$, to increase nearly linearly with time at a rate that is approximately the inverse of 210 Gyr (about 15 times the present age of the universe), nearly independently of the mass of the binary. This by itself would not lead to coalescence by the present time, but when it is augmented by gravitational radiation, it can lead to coalescence for equal-mass black hole binaries up to about $1.4\times 10^{14} M_\odot$, which might then be conjectured to be a very crude upper limit to the mass of black holes in our universe at the present time. This also suggests that the gravitational wave strain from coalescing supermassive black hole binaries should decrease for wave periods greater than about 100\,000 years.

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Don N. Page. 2026-08-25. Crudely Estimated Maximum Mass for a Cosmological Black Hole. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26203

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