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

By The Ligo Scientific Collaboration, The Virgo Collaboration. 2016

501 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/1b4d59a656c7bd1d5799b5bce758c4bc0d973d64

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Citations in the corpus

GWTC-1: A Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First and Second Observing Runs (2018, background): “During O1, two confident detections of binary black holes were made: GW150914 [1] and GW151226 [2].”
KAGRA: 2.5 generation interferometric gravitational wave detector (2018, unknown): “The ﬁrst ﬁve GW sources [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] were identiﬁed to be binary black holes (BHs).”
Dynamical boson stars (2012, methodology): “This observation has since been followed by a second BH binary and many more observations are expected from the facility [2].”
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): “Where most binaries have a nominal support for χ eff ¼ 0 , GW151226 was in GWTC-1 identified to exclude this value at > 90% probability[7,307], a conclusion which is strengthened further as of the analysis presented here in GWTC-2.”