Merging black hole binaries with the SEVN code
By Mario Spera, Michela Mapelli, N. Giacobbo, A. Trani, A. Bressan, G. Costa. Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2018
169 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Studying the formation and evolution of black hole binaries (BHBs) is essential for the interpretation of current and forthcoming gravitational wave (GW) detections. We investigate the statistics of BHBs that form from isolated binaries, by means of a new version of the SEVN population-synthesis code. SEVN integrates stellar evolution by interpolation over a grid of stellar evolution tracks. We upgraded SEVN to include binary stellar evolution processes and we used it to evolve a sample of $1.5\times{}10^8$ binary systems, with metallicity in the range $\left[10^{-4};4\times 10^{-2}\right]$. From our simulations, we find that the mass distribution of black holes (BHs) in double compact-object binaries is remarkably similar to the one obtained considering only single stellar evolution. The maximum BH mass we obtain is $\sim 30$, $45$ and $55\, \mathrm{M}_\odot$ at metallicity $Z=2\times 10^{-2}$, $6\times 10^{-3}$, and $10^{-4}$, respectively. A few massive single BHs may also form ($\lesssim 0.1\%$ of the total number of BHs), with mass up to $\sim 65$, $90$ and $145\, \mathrm{M}_\odot$ at $Z=2\times 10^{-2}$, $6\times 10^{-3}$, and $10^{-4}$, respectively. These BHs fall in the mass gap predicted from pair-instability supernovae. We also show that the most massive BHBs are unlikely to merge within a Hubble time. In our simulations, merging BHs like GW151226 and GW170608, form at all metallicities, the high-mass systems (like GW150914, GW170814 and GW170104) originate from metal poor ($Z\lesssim{}6\times 10^{-3}$) progenitors, whereas GW170729-like systems are hard to form, even at $Z = 10^{-4}$. The BHB merger rate in the local Universe obtained from our simulations is $\sim 90 \mathrm{Gpc}^{-3}\mathrm{yr}^{-1}$, consistent with the rate inferred from LIGO-Virgo data.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/09fa647e5fdf2ba683060b4836b8aa71ee9223b0
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Citations in the corpus
- COSMIC Variance in Binary Population Synthesis (2019, methodology): “Another approach is to generate large libraries of lookup tables for single stars and then use interpolation combined with simple binary evolution prescriptions, as done in SEVN (Spera et al. 2015; Spera & Mapelli 2017; Spera et al. 2019) or ComBinE (Kruckow et al. 2018).”
- Evolutionary roads leading to low effective spins, high black hole masses, and O1/O2 rates for LIGO/Virgo binary black holes (2017, background): “…2003; Dominik et al. 2012; Belczynski et al. 2016b; Eldridge & Stanway 2016; Woosley 2016; Stevenson et al. 2017; Kruckow et al. 2018; Hainich et al. 2018; Marchant et al. 2019; Spera et al. 2019) and its outcome was predicted to produce the first LIGO/Virgo sources (Belczynski et al. 2010b).”
- GW190521: Orbital Eccentricity and Signatures of Dynamical Formation in a Binary Black Hole Merger Signal (2020, background): “Another option is the direct collapse of stellar merger remnants to mass gap black holes(e.g., Spera et al. 2019; Kremer et al. 2020).”
- GW231123: A Binary Black Hole Merger with Total Mass 190–265 M⊙ (2025, unknown): “Weaker stellar winds (Mapelli et al. 2020) or core dredge-up episodes (Costa et al. 2021) may allow a star to retain a hydrogen envelope and collapse to a BH with mass inside the gap (Spera et al. 2019).”
- Constraints from Gravitational-wave Detections of Binary Black Hole Mergers on the 12C(α, γ)16O Rate (2020, background): “If a star can retain its hydrogen envelope until collapse, through a combination of weak stellar winds (Woosley 2017) or for a stellar merger (Spera et al. 2019; Vigna-Gómez et al. 2019), then we could find black holes up to~ M60 ; see van Son et al. (2020) for an overview.”
- Modeling Dense Star Clusters in the Milky Way and Beyond with the CMC Cluster Catalog (2019, background): “As discussed in, e.g., Spera et al. (2019) and Banerjee et al. (2019), massive stellar mergers occurring through binary evolution may have important consequences for the formation of massive BHs, specifically BHs lying within the so-called upper mass gap expected from (pulsational) pair-instability…”
- Formation and Evolution of Compact-object Binaries in AGN Disks (2019, background): “…evolution (Dominik et al. 2012; Kinugawa et al. 2014; Belczynski et al. 2016, 2017; Breivik et al. 2016; Giacobbo et al. 2018; Bavera et al. 2019; Spera et al. 2019) accompanied by mass transfer (Inayoshi et al. 2017a; Pavlovskii et al. 2017; van den Heuvel et al. 2017), common-envelope ejection…”