Use of gravitational waves to probe the formation channels of compact binaries

By S. Vitale, R. Lynch, R. Sturani, P. Graff. 2015

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With the discovery of the binary black hole coalescences GW150914 and GW151226, the era of gravitational-wave astrophysics has started. Gravitational-wave signals emitted by compact binary coalescences will be detected in large number by LIGO and Virgo in the coming months and years. Much about compact binaries is still uncertain, including some key details about their formation channels. The two scenarios which are typically considered, common envelope evolution and dynamical capture, result in different distributions for the orientation of the black hole spins. In particular, common envelope evolution is expected to be highly efficient in aligning spins with the orbital angular momentum. In this paper we simulate catalogs of gravitational-wave signals in which a given fraction of events comes from common envelope evolution, and has spins nearly aligned with the orbital angular momentum. We show how the fraction of aligned systems can be accurately estimated using Bayesian parameter estimation, with 1 σ uncertainties of the order of 10% after 100–200 sources are detected.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geochemistry and Petrology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4fcb9265b4c4521ad57682156237c81feebe3748

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Citations in the corpus

Are LIGO's Black Holes Made from Smaller Black Holes? (2017, methodology): “As Vitale et al. (2017) discuss, for a mixture of two (or more) models, we can write the posterior of the mixture parameter in terms of the Bayesian evidence for the models under consideration.”
The cosmic merger rate of stellar black hole binaries from the Illustris simulation (2017, methodology): “If they are the remnants of massive stars, such massive BHs should have formed from relatively metal-poor (Z ≤ 0.5 Z ) progenitors, which are expected to collapse directly to BHs (e.g. Mapelli et al. 2009, 2010, 2013; Belczynski et al. 2010; Spera et al. 2015).”
Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, background): “BH spin measurements also provide a powerful tool to discriminate between different channels of BBH formation (Mandel & O’Shaughnessy 2010; Abbott et al. 2016d; Rodriguez et al. 2016c; Farr et al. 2017, 2018; Gerosa & Berti 2017; Vitale et al. 2017; Gerosa et al. 2018).”
One Channel to Rule Them All? Constraining the Origins of Binary Black Holes Using Multiple Formation Pathways (2020, background): “…channels or constrain uncertain physical processes governing these channels (Stevenson et al. 2015; Rodriguez et al. 2016b; Stevenson et al. 2017; Vitale et al. 2017; Mandel et al. 2017; Zevin et al. 2017; Talbot & Thrane 2017; Farr et al. 2017a,b; Barrett et al. 2018; Taylor & Gerosa 2018;…”
Eccentric Black Hole Mergers in Dense Star Clusters: The Role of Binary–Binary Encounters (2018, background): “…spin orientations as a means to discriminate different BBH formation channels (Rodriguez et al. 2016b; Stevenson et al. 2017; Talbot & Thrane 2017; Vitale et al. 2017; Farr et al. 2017a,b; Gerosa et al. 2018; Sedda & Benacquista 2018; Schrøder et al. 2018); BBHs that evolve in isolation are…”
Evolutionary roads leading to low effective spins, high black hole masses, and O1/O2 rates for LIGO/Virgo binary black holes (2017, background): “The spin orientations of the BHs can therefore provide important information about their formation (Farr et al. 2017, 2018; Vitale et al. 2017a).”
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): “[156] Salvatore Vitale, Ryan Lynch, Riccardo Sturani, and Philip Graff, “Use of gravitational waves to probe the formation channels of compact binaries,” Class.”
An introduction to Bayesian inference in gravitational-wave astronomy: Parameter estimation, model selection, and hierarchical models (2018, unknown): “We use it to determine the Hubble constant (Abbott et al. 2017 d ), to study the formation mechanism of black hole binaries (Vitale et al. 2017; Stevenson, Berry, & Mandel 2017; Talbot & Thrane 2017; Gerosa & Berti 2017; Farr et al. 2017; Wysocki, Lange, & O’Shaughnessy 2018; Lower et al. 2018),…”
Surrogate models for precessing binary black hole simulations with unequal masses (2019, background): “One important application of the extracted spins is to distinguish between formation channels of BBHs [52–55].”
Hierarchical analysis of gravitational-wave measurements of binary black hole spin–orbit misalignments (2017, methodology): “One of the main limitations of the analysis performed by Vitale et al. (2017) is that they only consider models which are mutually exclusive, although this should not affect their results since the excluded region for their nonaligned model is negligible.”