The origin of spin in binary black holes

By Simone S. Bavera, Tassos Fragos, Ying Qin, Emmanouil Zapartas, Coenraad J. Neijssel, Ilya Mandel, A. Batta, Sebastian M. Gaebel, C. Kimball, Simon Stevenson. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2019

171 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Context. After years of scientific progress, the origin of stellar binary black holes is still a great mystery. Several formation channels for merging black holes have been proposed in the literature. As more merger detections are expected with future gravitational-wave observations, population synthesis studies can help to distinguish between them. Aims. We study the formation of coalescing binary black holes via the evolution of isolated field binaries that go through the common envelope phase in order to obtain the combined distributions of observables such as black-hole spins, masses and cosmological redshifts of mergers. Methods. To achieve this aim, we used a hybrid technique that combines the parametric binary population synthesis code COMPAS with detailed binary evolution simulations performed with the MESA code. We then convolved our binary evolution calculations with the redshift- and metallicity-dependent star-formation rate and the selection effects of gravitational-wave detectors to obtain predictions of observable properties. Results. By assuming efficient angular momentum transport, we are able to present a model that is capable of simultaneously predicting the following three main gravitational-wave observables: the effective inspiral spin parameter χeff, the chirp mass Mchirp and the cosmological redshift of merger zmerger. We find an excellent agreement between our model and the ten events from the first two advanced detector observing runs. We make predictions for the third observing run O3 and for Advanced LIGO design sensitivity. We expect approximately 80% of events with χeff < 0.1, while the remaining 20% of events with χeff ≥ 0.1 are split into ∼10% with Mchirp < 15 M⊙ and ∼10% with Mchirp ≥ 15 M⊙. Moreover, we find that Mchirp and χeff distributions are very weakly dependent on the detector sensitivity. Conclusions. The favorable comparison of the existing LIGO/Virgo observations with our model predictions gives support to the idea that the majority, if not all of the observed mergers, originate from the evolution of isolated binaries. The first-born black hole has negligible spin because it lost its envelope after it expanded to become a giant star, while the spin of the second-born black hole is determined by the tidal spin up of its naked helium star progenitor by the first-born black hole companion after the binary finished the common-envelope phase.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e4aa11c1a2de9c3c460cd0454ce951103b37a80

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Citations in the corpus

One Channel to Rule Them All? Constraining the Origins of Binary Black Holes Using Multiple Formation Pathways (2020, methodology): “Since only the CE and SMT channels are considered in Bavera et al. (2020a), the preference for low CE efficiencies comes from the necessity to produce some spinning systems to match the properties of the BBH population, whereas in this work such systems can be explained by alternative formation…”
Bayesian inference for compact binary coalescences with bilby: validation and application to the first LIGO–Virgo gravitational-wave transient catalogue (2020, background): “…stellar evolution (Stevenson et al. 2015; Abbott et al. 2016d; Zevin et al. 2017; Abbott et al. 2017h; Barrett et al. 2018; Belczynski et al. 2018; Bavera et al. 2020), the equation of state of neutron-star matter (Abbott et al. 2018c; Most et al. 2018; Essick et al. 2020; Abbott et al. 2020b),…”
Most Black Holes Are Born Very Slowly Rotating (2019, background): “Bavera et al. (2019) predict that roughly 40% of BH mergers detected by advanced LIGO should have χeff > 0.1 due to this evolutionary channel.”
Formation and Evolution of Compact-object Binaries in AGN Disks (2019, background): “…isolated binary 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),…”
GWTC-2.1: Deep extended catalog of compact binary coalescences observed by LIGO and Virgo during the first half of the third observing run (2021, background): “From a theoretical perspective, BH spin magnitudes are highly uncertain [235, 242], with some models [243, 244] predicting very low spins (∼ 0.”
GW231123: A Binary Black Hole Merger with Total Mass 190–265 M⊙ (2025, unknown): “…the BHs spinning, due to tidal synchronization or accretion-induced spin up, and so bi-naries with masses and spins like those inferred from GW231123 are difficult to form (Belczynski et al. 2020; Qin et al. 2018; Fuller & Ma 2019; Bavera et al. 2020; Belczynski et al. 2020; van Son et al. 2020).”
Evolutionary roads leading to low effective spins, high black hole masses, and O1/O2 rates for LIGO/Virgo binary black holes (2017, background): “We note that similar conclusions have been reached by Bavera et al. (2020) and Neijssel et al. (2019), although these authors used somewhat different approaches to their detailed stellar evolution models and a different population synthesis code was used.”