On 16/02/2016 11:20 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
Not necessarily new physics. The black holes were not sat in a perfect
vacuum and may still have had tenuous accretion disks or other material
in their respective equatorial planes some of which becomes up for grabs
when they merge. It would be surprising if the merger of BH ergospheres
did not provide some mechanism for pumping a fair amount of power out
along the polar axes of the newly formed object.

True, but let's face it, the accretion disks may have already been
around even before the two BH's merged, and they'd be radiating around
each individual progenitor BH's. Also it's entirely likely that all of
the gas between the black holes were kicked out as the two of them
neared each other.

Including but not limited to electromagnetic radiation and particle
creation. It is only the interior of the BH that is forbidden territory
- outside it is a region where things can still interact.

That might be the way to find it...comparing old surveys with new ones
and looking for something faint but with a new flat spectral index.

I have feeling that the gravity waves might have excited the quantum
vacuum energy field nearby which might have spurred the creation of real
photons.

Yousuf Khan