Evolutionary roads leading to low effective spins, high black hole masses, and O1/O2 rates for LIGO/Virgo binary black holes

By Krzysztof Belczyński, J. Klencki, C. Fields, A. Olejak, Emanuele Berti, G. Meynet, Chris L. Fryer, D. Holz, R. O’Shaughnessy, D. Brown and 22 more. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2017

299 citations recorded by the source corpus.

All ten LIGO/Virgo binary black hole (BH-BH) coalescences reported following the O1/O2 runs have near-zero effective spins. There are only three potential explanations for this. If the BH spin magnitudes are large, then: (i) either both BH spin vectors must be nearly in the orbital plane or (ii) the spin angular momenta of the BHs must be oppositely directed and similar in magnitude. Then there is also the possibility that (iii) the BH spin magnitudes are small. We consider the third hypothesis within the framework of the classical isolated binary evolution scenario of the BH-BH merger formation. We test three models of angular momentum transport in massive stars: a mildly efficient transport by meridional currents (as employed in the Geneva code), an efficient transport by the Tayler-Spruit magnetic dynamo (as implemented in the MESA code), and a very-efficient transport (as proposed by Fuller et al.) to calculate natal BH spins. We allow for binary evolution to increase the BH spins through accretion and account for the potential spin-up of stars through tidal interactions. Additionally, we update the calculations of the stellar-origin BH masses, including revisions to the history of star formation and to the chemical evolution across cosmic time. We find that we can simultaneously match the observed BH-BH merger rate density and BH masses and BH-BH effective spins. Models with efficient angular momentum transport are favored. The updated stellar-mass weighted gas-phase metallicity evolution now used in our models appears to be key for obtaining an improved reproduction of the LIGO/Virgo merger rate estimate. Mass losses during the pair-instability pulsation supernova phase are likely to be overestimated if the merger GW170729 hosts a BH more massive than 50 M⊙. We also estimate rates of black hole-neutron star (BH-NS) mergers from recent LIGO/Virgo observations. If, in fact. angular momentum transport in massive stars is efficient, then any (electromagnetic or gravitational wave) observation of a rapidly spinning BH would indicate either a very effective tidal spin up of the progenitor star (homogeneous evolution, high-mass X-ray binary formation through case A mass transfer, or a spin- up of a Wolf-Rayet star in a close binary by a close companion), significant mass accretion by the hole, or a BH formation through the merger of two or more BHs (in a dense stellar cluster).

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/53e205c1af78351fe35689ce348f9ee4a4b35926

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Citations in the corpus

Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, result): “…and theory are making it possible to quantitatively compare rate predictions against observations for the first time (e.g., Abbott et al., 2019a, 2020f; Belczynski et al., 2018a; Wysocki et al., 2018; Neijssel et al., 2019; Bavera et al., 2021; Belczynski et al., 2020; Farmer et al., 2020).”
COSMIC Variance in Binary Population Synthesis (2019, methodology): “In addition, we have included the prescriptions for BH spin based on the pre-collapse CO core mass of the progenitor from Belczynski et al. (2017), which result in high spins for low-mass BHs (.”
The progenitors of compact-object binaries: impact of metallicity, common envelope and natal kicks (2018, methodology): “…Colpi et al. 2003; Mapelli et al. 2005; Grindlay et al. 2006; Ivanova et al. 2008; Clausen et al. 2013; Mapelli & Zampieri 2014; Ziosi et al. 2014; Rodriguez et al. 2015, 2016; Mapelli 2016; Askar et al. 2016; Antonini et al. 2017; Petrovich & Antonini 2017; Banerjee 2017; Belczynski et al. 2017a).”
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): “VII.”
GW231123: A Binary Black Hole Merger with Total Mass 190–265 M⊙ (2025, unknown): “…the BHs spinning, due to tidal synchronization or accretion-induced spin up, and so bi-naries with masses and spins like those inferred from GW231123 are difficult to form (Belczynski et al. 2020; Qin et al. 2018; Fuller & Ma 2019; Bavera et al. 2020; Belczynski et al. 2020; van Son et al. 2020).”
Measuring the Binary Black Hole Mass Spectrum with an Astrophysically Motivated Parameterization (2018, methodology): “In contrast to this, population synthesis models typically predict that the distribution of mass ratios should prefer equalmass binaries (e.g., Belczynski et al. 2017).”
1-OGC: The First Open Gravitational-wave Catalog of Binary Mergers from Analysis of Public Advanced LIGO Data (2018, result): “This is consistent with recent population synthesis models, which indicate that black holes must have low natal spin in order to obtain a distribution of effc that satisfies gravitational-wave observations (Belczynski et al. 2017; Wysocki et al. 2018).”