The progenitors of compact-object binaries: impact of metallicity, common envelope and natal kicks

By N. Giacobbo, Michela Mapelli. Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2018

227 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Six gravitational wave events have been reported by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration (LVC), five of them associated with black hole binary (BHB) mergers and one with a double neutron star (DNS) merger, while the coalescence of a black hole-neutron star (BHNS) binary is still missing. We investigate the progenitors of double compact object binaries with our population-synthesis code MOBSE. MOBSE includes advanced prescriptions for mass loss by stellar winds (depending on metallicity and on the Eddington ratio) and a formalism for core-collapse, electron-capture and (pulsational) pair instability supernovae. We investigate the impact of progenitor's metallicity, of the common-envelope parameter $\alpha{}$ and of the natal kicks on the properties of DNSs, BHNSs and BHBs. We find that neutron-star (NS) masses in DNSs span from 1.1 to 2.0 M$_\odot$, with a preference for light NSs, while NSs in merging BHNSs have mostly large masses ($1.3-2.0$ M$_\odot$). BHs in merging BHNSs are preferentially low mass ($5-15$ M$_\odot$). BH masses in merging BHBs strongly depend on the progenitor's metallicity and span from $\sim{}5$ to $\sim{}45$ M$_\odot$. The local merger rate density of both BHNSs and BHBs derived from our simulations is consistent with the values reported by the LVC in all our simulations. In contrast, the local merger rate density of DNSs matches the value inferred from the LVC only if low natal kicks are assumed. This result adds another piece to the intricate puzzle of natal kicks and DNS formation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/269d2df3d8099b564abcdbde5a30423b38c5659f

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Michela Mapelli
2. N. Giacobbo
3. Ilya Mandel
4. Mario Spera
5. D. Holz
6. Maya Fishbach
7. F. Rasio
8. T. Bulik

Citations in the corpus

• COSMIC Variance in Binary Population Synthesis (2019, background): “…(Hurley et al. 2002), SeBa (Portegies Zwart & Verbunt 1996; Nelemans et al. 2001; Toonen et al. 2012), StarTrack (Belczynski et al. 2002, 2008), binary c (Izzard et al. 2004, 2006, 2009), COMPAS (Stevenson et al. 2017; Barrett et al. 2018), and MOBSE (Giacobbo et al. 2018; Giacobbo & Mapelli 2018).”
• Merging black holes in young star clusters (2019, methodology): “…MZAMS < 60 M is an effect of mass accretion, while most of the BHs with mass lower than expected from single star evolution originate from donor stars whose envelope was peeled off (see Giacobbo & Mapelli 2018 and Spera et al. 2018 for more details on the effects of binary evolution on BH masses).”
• Merging black hole binaries with the SEVN code (2018, methodology): “To calculate the merger rate density of BHBs in the local Universe (RBHB) we adopt the simple analytic calculation described in Section 3.5 of Giacobbo & Mapelli (2018): RBHB = 1 H0 tlb(z = 0.1) ∫ zmin zmax floc(z) SFR(z) (1 + z) [ M (1 + z)3 + λ]1/2 dz, (26) where SFR(z) is the star formation rate…”
• Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, background): “…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 al. 2018; Mapelli & Giacobbo 2018) or via chemically homogeneous evolution(de Mink & Mandel…”
• The origin of spin in binary black holes (2019, background): “Uncertainties in (i) how the CE phase is accounted for, namely different choices of the αCE parameter which characterizes the efficiency of transferring orbital energy into unbinding the CE might lead to different rate predictions (see e.g., Giacobbo & Mapelli 2018).”
• The effect of the metallicity-specific star formation history on double compact object mergers (2019, background): “This is comparable to the impact of uncertainties on evolutionary physics such as wind mass-loss rates, conservativeness of mass transfer, the efficiency of common-envelope evolution, and BH natal kicks (Dominik et al. 2012; Giacobbo & Mapelli 2018; Kruckow et al. 2018).”
• The cosmic merger rate of neutron stars and black holes (2018, methodology): “The main updates of MOBSE with respect to BSE are the following (see Giacobbo et al. 2018 and Giacobbo & Mapelli 2018a for details).”
• 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): “[262] Nicola Giacobbo and Michela Mapelli, “The progenitors”