GW151226: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a 22-Solar-Mass Binary Black Hole Coalescence

By P. Groot, H. Grote, S. Grunewald, G. Guidi, X. Guo, A. Gupta, M. Gupta, K. Gushwa, E. Gustafson, R. Gustafson and 289 more. 2016

1,939 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report the observation of a gravitational-wave signal produced by the coalescence of two stellar-mass black holes. The signal, GW151226, was observed by the twin detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) on December 26, 2015 at 03:38:53 UTC. The signal was initially identified within 70 s by an online matched-filter search targeting binary coalescences. Subsequent off-line analyses recovered GW151226 with a network signal-to-noise ratio of 13 and a significance greater than 5 $\sigma$. The signal persisted in the LIGO frequency band for approximately 1 s, increasing in frequency and amplitude over about 55 cycles from 35 to 450 Hz, and reached a peak gravitational strain of $3.4_{-0.9}^{+0.7} \times 10^{-22}$. The inferred source-frame initial black hole masses are $14.2_{-3.7}^{+8.3} M_{\odot}$ and $7.5_{-2.3}^{+2.3} M_{\odot}$ and the final black hole mass is $20.8_{-1.7}^{+6.1} M_{\odot}$. We find that at least one of the component black holes has spin greater than 0.2. This source is located at a luminosity distance of $440_{-190}^{+180}$ Mpc corresponding to a redshift $0.09_{-0.04}^{+0.03}$. All uncertainties define a 90 % credible interval. This second gravitational-wave observation provides improved constraints on stellar populations and on deviations from general relativity.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0ff73fe99385ffeeed8a16bd3a7cc6391e2754fc

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. B. Metzger
2. E. Berger
3. Ilya Mandel
4. Michela Mapelli
5. N. Langer
6. N. Giacobbo
7. Robert G. Izzard
8. D. Holz

In Ocean Engineering

1. D. Holz
2. K. Saikawa
3. B. Metzger
4. Ilya Mandel
5. T. Tauris
6. E. Berger
7. E. Thrane
8. Colm Talbot

Citations in the corpus

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