The major source of ground-based gravitational wave detectors, the inspiral and merger of comparable mass binary black holes (BBH), consists of a slow quasicircular inspiral, a merger to form a single remnant hole, and the quasinormal ringing of that remnant. The first and last of these epochs are amenable to well-developed and familiar approximations: Newtonian or post-Newtonian for the first and BH perturbation methods for the last. The middle epoch, the merger, generates most of the gravitational wave emission, yet has been accessible so far only to numerical relativity. Here, we add the close-limit approximation for the phenomenology of the merger. With the completed set of methods (Newtonian/post-Newtonian; close limit; BH perturbation theory), we show that not only can we understand the results of BBH coalescence, but—with reasonable accuracy—we can predict aspects of resulting radiation and remnant.

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• General relativity
• Gravitational waves