The cosmic merger rate of stellar black hole binaries from the Illustris simulation

By Michela Mapelli, N. Giacobbo, E. Ripamonti, Mario Spera. 2017

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The cosmic merger rate density of black hole binaries (BHBs) can give us an essential clue to constraining the formation channels of BHBs, in light of current and forthcoming gravitational wave detections. Following a Monte Carlo approach, we couple new population-synthesis models of BHBs with the Illustris cosmological simulation, to study the cosmic history of BHB mergers. We explore six population-synthesis models, varying the prescriptions for supernovae, common envelope and natal kicks. In most considered models, the cosmic BHB merger rate follows the same trend as the cosmic star formation rate. The normalization of the cosmic BHB merger rate strongly depends on the treatment of common envelope and on the distribution of natal kicks. We find that most BHBs merging within LIGO's instrumental horizon come from relatively metal-poor progenitors (<0.2 Z_⊙). The total masses of merging BHBs span a large range of values, from ∼6 to ∼82 M_⊙. In our fiducial model, merging BHBs consistent with GW150914, GW151226 and GW170104 represent ∼6, 3 and 12 per cent of all BHBs merging within the LIGO horizon, respectively. The heavy systems, like GW150914, come from metal-poor progenitors (<0.15 Z_⊙). Most GW150914-like systems merging in the local Universe appear to have formed at high redshift, with a long delay time. In contrast, GW151226-like systems form and merge all the way through the cosmic history, from progenitors with a broad range of metallicities. Future detections will be crucial to put constraints on common envelope, on natal kicks, and on the BHB mass function.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2570741a77254f2fbf5f9eeadd24b31ba63c4fa0

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Citations in the corpus

Merging black holes in young star clusters (2019, methodology): “…000, 000–000 (0000) tegrated the new population synthesis code MOBSE, which implements up-to-date stellar winds, binary evolution and supernova models (Mapelli et al. 2017; Giacobbo et al. 2018; Giacobbo & Mapelli 2018), with the direct summation NBody code NBODY6++GPU, which allows us to account…”
Progenitors of gravitational wave mergers: binary evolution with the stellar grid-based code ComBinE (2018, unknown): “There are several binary population synthesis studies performed with the codes StarTrack (Belczynski et al. 2008; Dominik et al. 2013, 2015; Chruslinska et al. 2018), binary c (Izzard et al. 2004, 2006, 2009, 2018), BPASS (Eldridge & Stanway 2016; Eldridge et al. 2017), COMPAS (Stevenson et al. 2017”
Merging black hole binaries: the effects of progenitor's metallicity, mass-loss rate and Eddington factor (2017, background): “As already discussed in Mapelli et al. (2017), this is likely due to the fact that a lower value of α λ makes the spiral in of the cores much more efficient, bringing the two cores on a much smaller final orbital separation.”
Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, background): “…2008, 2014; Voss & Tauris 2003; Dewi et al. 2006; Dominik et al. 2013; Mennekens & Vanbeveren 2014; Spera et al. 2015; Eldridge & Stanway 2016; Mapelli et al. 2017; Stevenson et al. 2017b; Tauris et al. 2017; Chruslinska et al. 2018; Giacobbo & Mapelli 2018; Giacobbo et al. 2018; Kruckow et…”
A Future Percent-level Measurement of the Hubble Expansion at Redshift 0.8 with Advanced LIGO (2019, background): “The PISN mass scale, however, is not expected to evolve by more than 1– M2 to z 1.5 (Belczynski et al. 2016; Mapelli et al. 2017).”
Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, background): “…the local merger rate is sensitive to the poorly known metallicity-specific star formation rate at high redshifts (Belczynski et al., 2010; Mapelli et al., 2017; Klencki et al., 2018; Chruslinska et al., 2019; Neijssel et al., 2019; Chruslinska and Nelemans, 2019; Tang et al., 2020;…”
The cosmic merger rate of neutron stars and black holes (2018, methodology): “This result is consistent with the trend found by Mapelli et al. (2017) for BHBs and is the effect of a convolution between the cosmic SFR density and the distribution of delay times.”
Does the Black Hole Merger Rate Evolve with Redshift? (2018, background): “1.5 (see Figure 1), where Equation 5 is likely a good approximation, particularly if the distribution of delay times is broad (see, for example, Figure 3 in Mapelli et al. 2017; Chatterjee et al. 2017).”
The effect of the metallicity-specific star formation history on double compact object mergers (2019, background): “These findings are similar to Dominik et al. (2012) and Mapelli et al. (2017).”
The progenitors of compact-object binaries: impact of metallicity, common envelope and natal kicks (2018, methodology): “Previous studies (Belczynski et al. 2016; Lamberts et al. 2016; Mapelli et al. 2017) indicate that the distribution of delay times should approximately scale as t−1.”