The Mass Distribution of Galactic Double Neutron Stars

By N. Farrow, X. Zhu 朱, E. Thrane. Astrophysical Journal, 2019

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The conventional wisdom, dating back to 2012, is that the mass distribution of Galactic double neutron stars (DNSs) is well-fit by a Gaussian distribution with a mean of 1.33 M⊙ and a width of 0.09 M⊙. With the recent discovery of new Galactic DNSs and GW170817, the first neutron star merger event to be observed with gravitational waves, it is timely to revisit this model. In order to constrain the mass distribution of DNSs, we perform Bayesian inference using a sample of 17 Galactic DNSs, effectively doubling the sample used in previous studies. We expand the space of models so that the recycled neutron star need not be drawn from the same distribution as the nonrecycled companion. Moreover, we consider different functional forms including uniform, single-Gaussian, and two-Gaussian distributions. While there is insufficient data to draw firm conclusions, we find positive support (a Bayes factor (BF) of 9) for the hypothesis that recycled and nonrecycled neutron stars have distinct mass distributions. The most probable model—preferred with a BF of 29 over the conventional model—is one in which the recycled neutron star mass is distributed according to a two-Gaussian distribution, and the nonrecycled neutron star mass is distributed uniformly. We show that precise component mass measurements of ≈20 DNSs are required in order to determine with high confidence (a BF of 150) whether recycled and nonrecycled neutron stars come from a common distribution. Approximately 60 DNSs are needed in order to establish the detailed shape of the distributions.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/175ee3121a71f3dd380df6aa662ca9b788c0488f

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Citations in the corpus

GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run (2020, background): “1 M⊙ is greater than that of observed Galactic BNSs [274,275].”
Observation of Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 2.5–4.5 M ⊙ Compact Object and a Neutron Star (2024, unknown): “The mass of the secondary is consistent with the distribution of known neutron star masses, including Galactic pulsars (Antoniadis et al. 2016; Alsing et al. 2018; ¨Ozel & Freire 2016; Farrow et al. 2019) and extragalactic GW observations (Landry & Read 2021; Abbott et al. 2023b).”
Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, background): “Nearly 20 such binaries have been observed in the Galaxy through radio pulsar pulsar observations (see, e.g., Tauris et al., 2017; Farrow et al., 2019, for recent compilations).”