Measuring the Binary Black Hole Mass Spectrum with an Astrophysically Motivated Parameterization

By Colm Talbot, E. Thrane. 2018

216 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gravitational-wave detections have revealed a previously unknown population of stellar mass black holes with masses above 20 M⊙. These observations provide a new way to test models of stellar evolution for massive stars. By considering the astrophysical processes likely to determine the shape of the binary black hole mass spectrum, we construct a parameterized model to capture key spectral features that relate gravitational-wave data to theoretical stellar astrophysics. In particular, we model the signature of pulsational pair-instability supernovae, which are expected to cause all stars with initial mass 100 M⊙ ≲ M ≲ 150 M⊙ to form ∼40 M⊙ black holes. This would cause a cutoff in the black hole mass spectrum along with an excess of black holes near 40 M⊙. We carry out a simulated data study to illustrate some of the stellar physics that can be inferred using gravitational-wave measurements of binary black holes and demonstrate several such inferences that might be made in the near future. First, we measure the minimum and maximum stellar black hole mass. Second, we infer the presence of a peak due to pair-instability supernovae. Third, we measure the distribution of black hole mass ratios. Finally, we show how inadequate models of the black hole mass spectrum lead to biased estimates of the merger rate and the amplitude of the stochastic gravitational-wave background.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/161de5cb4d05eb11a11c9e3dc17d2cc725d9193d

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

An introduction to Bayesian inference in gravitational-wave astronomy: Parameter estimation, model selection, and hierarchical models (2018, unknown): “…of black hole binaries (Vitale et al. 2017; Stevenson, Berry, & Mandel 2017; Talbot & Thrane 2017; Gerosa & Berti 2017; Farr et al. 2017; Wysocki, Lange, & O’Shaughnessy 2018; Lower et al. 2018), and to probe how stars die (Fishbach & Holz 2017; Talbot & Thrane 2018; Abbott et al. 2018 a ).”
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, unknown): “6 M ⊙ [122,198,199].”
Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, methodology): “As such, we adopt the union of the parameterizations presented in Talbot & Thrane (2017), Fishbach & Holz (2017), Wysocki et al. (2018), Talbot & Thrane (2018), and Fishbach et al. (2018).”
4-OGC: Catalog of Gravitational Waves from Compact Binary Mergers (2021, background): “The growing population will eventually enable distinguishing possible formation channels and the potential contribution from each (Talbot & Thrane 2018; Abbott et al. 2019b, 2021b, 2021h; Roulet et al. 2020).”
Constraints on the Cosmic Expansion History from GWTC–3 (2021, background): “The third model is a superposition of a Truncated and a Gaussian component referred to as Power Law + Peak, in which the primary mass distribution is described by a PL with the addition of a Gaussian peak with mean µg and variance σ2g (Talbot & Thrane 2018).”