Why hasn’t the smaller been completely swallowed by the larger? The mass and therfore gravitational difference is insane... the orbit of the smaller should degrade quickly I would figure... yet it seems this pair has been doing this dance for quite a while...
The mother of all Lagrangians must end in a sausage instability.
Blackholes have immense mass, right? The forces of the smaller one, as it catapults about the larger one, might just be enough to counter the pull for a million or so orbits.
***Why hasn’t the smaller been completely swallowed by the larger?***
My question precisely. Unless, the smaller mass has more density by virtue of its diminuition.
I’m pretty sure they could orbit each other for billions of years, no problem (though this precession business might be sapping energy from the system), just like tiny Pluto has orbited the Sun for 4.5 billion years. It’s only when the orbit decays enough that the smaller black hole begins to smash through the accretion disk of the larger black hole that the orbital decay really accelerates.
The mass of the 2 objects doesn't matter all by itself. The 2 objects have a field between them and trajectories. Leaving the trajectories out of the calculation results in the error that they'll collide. The mass ratio is only 170, so they're both dancing. Since they're black holes though, the mass of each object is increasing, and the accretion disks are providing friction. That means the orbits will slowly degrade.
Note that the field is very high, so the warpage of space around the 2 is huge. That means that clocks in that region of space run very slow. Even though the ~separation is 0.2 light years, the orbital frequency is 12 years. So, the degradation will be very slow.
The same reason that the Sun hasn't swallowed the Earth. The mass of the smaller black hole is small in proportion to that of the larger black hole so you can just use Kepler's equations to describe its motion. Due to how black holes work with general relativity, they will radiate away energy in gravitational waves until they collide.
The larger black hole has the mass of a very small galaxy. It is frighteningly large. I wonder if it was previously a galactic center.