GW190412: Observation of a Binary-Black-Hole Coalescence with Asymmetric Masses

By The Ligo Scientific Collaboration, T. Abbott, T. Abbott, S. Abraham, F. Acernese, K. Ackley, C. Adams, Rana X. Adhikari, V. Adya, C. Affeldt and 1,241 more. 2020

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We report the observation of gravitational waves from a binary-black-hole coalescence during the first two weeks of LIGO's and Virgo's third observing run. The signal was recorded on April 12, 2019 at 05:30:44 UTC with a network signal-to-noise ratio of 19. The binary is different from observations during the first two observing runs most notably due to its asymmetric masses: a ~30 solar mass black hole merged with a ~8 solar mass black hole companion. The more massive black hole rotated with a dimensionless spin magnitude between 0.17 and 0.59 (90% probability). Asymmetric systems are predicted to emit gravitational waves with stronger contributions from higher multipoles, and indeed we find strong evidence for gravitational radiation beyond the leading quadrupolar order in the observed signal. A suite of tests performed on GW190412 indicates consistency with Einstein's general theory of relativity. While the mass ratio of this system differs from all previous detections, we show that it is consistent with the population model of stellar binary black holes inferred from the first two observing runs.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/02e79992194532b5af0f2173bcb1edff2b40d10a

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Citations in the corpus

Bayesian inference for compact binary coalescences with bilby: validation and application to the first LIGO–Virgo gravitational-wave transient catalogue (2020, background): “The third observing run may yield O(102) additional observations (Abbott et al. 2018b), with a second binary neutron star merger signal already confirmed (Abbott et al. 2020c) and an additional binary black hole merger (Abbott et al. 2020a).”
Spinning black hole binary dynamics, scattering amplitudes, and effective field theory (2020, background): “As highlighted by the recent detection of black hole spin during inspiral phase [48], such effects are of considerable importance in light of astrophysical evidence that black holes can have a variety of intrinsic angular momenta, including close to maximally-allowed values [49].”
GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run (2020, methodology): “06) and exhibits strong signs of HM contributions to the waveform [236].”
Observational Constraints on Black Hole Spin (2020, background): “The LIGO-Virgo/O3 event, GW190814 (Abbott et al. 2020b), consists of a 23 M black hole merging with a 2.6 M compact object.”