Are merging black holes born from stellar collapse or previous mergers

By Davide Gerosa, Emanuele Berti. 2017

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Advanced LIGO detectors at Hanford and Livingston made two confirmed and one marginal detection of binary black holes during their first observing run. The first event, GW150914, was from the merger of two black holes much heavier that those whose masses have been estimated so far, indicating a formation scenario that might differ from “ordinary” stellar evolution. One possibility is that these heavy black holes resulted from a previous merger. When the progenitors of a black hole binary merger result from previous mergers, they should (on average) merge later, be more massive, and have spin magnitudes clustered around a dimensionless spin ∼ 0.7. Here we ask the following question: can gravitational-wave observations determine whether merging black holes were born from the collapse of massive stars (“first generation”), rather than being the end product of earlier mergers (“second generation”)? We construct simple, observationally motivated populations of black hole binaries, and we use Bayesian model selection to show that measurements of the masses, luminosity distance (or redshift), and “effective spin” of black hole binaries can indeed distinguish between these different formation scenarios.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5d51235b1d7e3ff8a09df9ad17c0a6ed583587e0

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Citations in the corpus

Where Are LIGO’s Big Black Holes? (2017, background): “The BBH spin distribution will provide further constraints on the existence of these subpopulations and will allow us to measure the fraction of BBHs that formed through previous mergers (Fishbach et al. 2017; Gerosa & Berti 2017).”
Are LIGO's Black Holes Made from Smaller Black Holes? (2017, unknown): “Our approach is complementary to that of Gerosa & Berti (2017), who study the expected distributions of mass, redshift, and binary spin parameter χeff for populations of first- and second-generation BHs and show how to use all three measurements to constrain the fraction of second-generation BHs in…”
Most Black Holes Are Born Very Slowly Rotating (2019, background): “However, a caveat is the population of rapidly rotating (a ∼ 0.7) BH primaries expected for second generation cluster mergers (Antonini & Rasio 2016; Fishbach et al. 2017; Gerosa & Berti 2017; Rodriguez et al. 2018).”
Merging black hole binaries with the SEVN code (2018, background): “…for the formation of ∼30−40 M BHs include primordial BHs (i.e. BHs formed by gravitational instabilities in the very early Universe, e.g. Carr, Kühnel & Sandstad 2016; Sasaki et al. 2018) and second-generation BHs (i.e. BHs formed from the mergers of smaller stellar BHs, Gerosa & Berti 2017).”
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): “[208] Davide Gerosa and Emanuele Berti, “Are merging black holes born from stellar collapse or previous mergers?” Phys.”
Primordial black holes confront LIGO/Virgo data: current situation (2020, background): “[2, 107] are incompatible with a primordial origin for GW190412 unless: (i) accretion is significant during the cosmic history of PBHs; (ii) PBHs can be formed with non-negligible natal spin (as in some scenarios [27, 28]), in contrast with the most likely formation scenarios [25], in which the spin”
Merging black holes in young star clusters (2019, background): “In 3 Second-generation BHs (Gerosa & Berti 2017, i.e. BHs formed from the merger of two BHs) are not shown in Figures 2 and 3.”
Formation and Evolution of Compact-object Binaries in AGN Disks (2019, background): “GW observations may statistically distinguish a population of higher-generation mergers based on the measurement of the effective spin (Fishbach et al. 2017; Gerosa & Berti 2017).”
Black hole growth through hierarchical black hole mergers in dense star clusters: implications for gravitational wave detections (2018, background): “After the first few mergers, we expect χ ≈ 0.7 (Gerosa & Berti 2017; Fishbach et al. 2017).”
The evolution of primordial black holes and their final observable spins (2020, background): “They are therefore similar to those computed in other astrophysical scenarios [28, 29, 63].”
Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, background): “…population features(Mandel & O’Shaughnessy 2010; Stevenson et al. 2015, 2017a; Farr et al. 2017, 2018; Fishbach et al. 2017; Fishbach & Holz 2017; Gerosa & Berti 2017; Kovetz et al. 2017; Talbot & Thrane 2017, 2018; Zevin et al. 2017; Barrett et al. 2018; Gerosa et al. 2018; Wysocki et al.…”
Evolutionary roads leading to low effective spins, high black hole masses, and O1/O2 rates for LIGO/Virgo binary black holes (2017, background): “It seems unlikely that isolated binaries can fill this gap, but repeated BH-BH mergers in dense environments could produce such heavy BHs, and it is expected that they would have moderately high spins aspin ≈ 0.7 (Gerosa & Berti 2017; Fishbach et al. 2017).”
Search for Gravitational Lensing Signatures in LIGO-Virgo Binary Black Hole Events (2019, background): “1, we emphasize that repeated binaries can also be an alternative explanation of high mass events exceeding upper mass limit (Gerosa & Berti 2017; Rodriguez et al. 2018).”
GW190521: Orbital Eccentricity and Signatures of Dynamical Formation in a Binary Black Hole Merger Signal (2020, background): “Dynamical formation is the preferred pathway for binaries with more extreme masses (Gerosa & Berti 2017; Bouffanais et al. 2019; Rodriguez et al. 2019; Fragione et al. 2020a, 2020b), isotropically distributed spin tilt angles (Rodriguez et al. 2016; Talbot & Thrane 2017), and nonzero orbital…”
Hierarchical analysis of gravitational-wave measurements of binary black hole spin–orbit misalignments (2017, background): “Optimal hierarchical modelling should fold in all available information, including component masses (cf. Ro- MNRAS 000, 1–12 (2017) driguez et al. 2016) and spin magnitudes (cf. Gerosa & Berti 2017; Fishbach et al. 2017), into a single analysis.”
Constraints from Gravitational-wave Detections of Binary Black Hole Mergers on the 12C(α, γ)16O Rate (2020, background): “If they are distinguishable from mergers due to isolated binary evolution, for instance via their spin (Fishbach et al. 2017; Gerosa & Berti 2017; Bouffanais et al. 2019; Arca Sedda et al. 2020), then they could be removed from the population used to infer the a gC , O12 16( ) rate.”