Search for Lensing Signatures in the Gravitational-Wave Observations from the First Half of LIGO–Virgo’s Third Observing Run

By The Ligo Scientific Collaboration, T. Abbott, T. Abbott, S. Abraham, F. Acernese, K. Ackley, A. Adams, C. Adams, Rana X. Adhikari, V. Adya and 1,368 more. 2021

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We search for signatures of gravitational lensing in the gravitational-wave signals from compact binary coalescences detected by Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and Advanced Virgo during O3a, the first half of their third observing run. We study: (1) the expected rate of lensing at current detector sensitivity and the implications of a non-observation of strong lensing or a stochastic gravitational-wave background on the merger-rate density at high redshift; (2) how the interpretation of individual high-mass events would change if they were found to be lensed; (3) the possibility of multiple images due to strong lensing by galaxies or galaxy clusters; and (4) possible wave-optics effects due to point-mass microlenses. Several pairs of signals in the multiple-image analysis show similar parameters and, in this sense, are nominally consistent with the strong lensing hypothesis. However, taking into account population priors, selection effects, and the prior odds against lensing, these events do not provide sufficient evidence for lensing. Overall, we find no compelling evidence for lensing in the observed gravitational-wave signals from any of these analyses.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3020614ac49a6e60b1927cdecd84eb40f2f7648e

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Michela Mapelli
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4. N. Giacobbo
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7. R. O’Shaughnessy
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Citations in the corpus

• GW231123: A Binary Black Hole Merger with Total Mass 190–265 M⊙ (2025, unknown): “Second, we conduct a residuals analysis, subtracting the best-fit waveform from the detector data and searching for coherent residual power (Abbott et al. 2021b).”
• 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, background): “A subset of the 8 additional events have been found in the LVC search of O3a data [29] for faint gravitationally lensed counterpart images [30, 31], and in the independent 3-OGC [17] analysis.”