Basically, my question is the title. If a black hole crosses the Roche limit of another black hole, what happens?
For a hypothetical example, let’s say you have a two black holes: one at 5 solar masses and one at 300 solar masses. If the smaller black hole crosses the Roche limit of the larger what happens? Does they simply merge? Would the event horizon of one or both black hole’s be geometrically distorted in some way or retain their spherical shape?
No, not just presumably. LIGO picks up and measures black hole mergers semi-regularly. They’re just loud (in gravitational waves) and very easy to interpret.