Does the Black Hole Merger Rate Evolve with Redshift?
By Maya Fishbach, D. Holz, W. Farr. Astrophysical Journal, 2018
232 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We explore the ability of gravitational-wave detectors to extract the redshift distribution of binary black hole (BBH) mergers. The evolution of the merger rate across redshifts 0 < z ≲ 1 is directly tied to the formation and evolutionary processes, providing insight regarding the progenitor formation rate together with the distribution of time delays between formation and merger. Because the limiting distance to which BBHs are detected depends on the masses of the binary, the redshift distribution of detected binaries depends on their underlying mass distribution. We therefore consider the mass and redshift distributions simultaneously, and fit the merger rate density, dN/dm1 dm2 dz. Our constraints on the mass distribution agree with previously published results, including evidence for an upper mass cutoff at ∼40 M⊙. Additionally, we show that the current set of six BBH detections are consistent with a merger rate density that is uniform in comoving volume. Although our constraints on the redshift distribution are not yet tight enough to distinguish between BBH formation channels, we show that it will be possible to distinguish between different astrophysically motivated models of the merger rate evolution with ∼100–300 Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory/Virgo detections (to be expected within 2–5 years). Specifically, we will be able to infer whether the formation rate peaks at higher or lower redshifts than the star formation rate, or the typical time delay between formation and merger. Meanwhile, with ∼100 detections, the inferred redshift distribution will place constraints on more exotic scenarios such as modified gravity.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/65e152002b19ff985a688e1873e751a203bdff71
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- One Channel to Rule Them All? Constraining the Origins of Binary Black Holes Using Multiple Formation Pathways (2020, background): “In the following, we are only interested in the shape of the populations and not the rate, and implicitly marginalize out the rate term by assuming a p(N) ∝ 1/N prior on the number of detections (Fishbach et al. 2018).”
- Extracting distribution parameters from multiple uncertain observations with selection biases (2018, background): “(23) This equation is the posterior for a hierarchical analysis of the number density and properties of objects from a data set subject to selection effects (e.g. Gair et al. 2010; Youdin 2011; Fishbach et al. 2018; Wysocki et al. 2018).”
- Two populations of LIGO-Virgo black holes (2020, background): “The redshift dependence of the merger rate is an essential characteristic of the BH binary population [32].”
- Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, methodology): “As such, we adopt the union of the parameterizations presented in Talbot & Thrane (2017), Fishbach & Holz (2017), Wysocki et al. (2018), Talbot & Thrane (2018), and Fishbach et al. (2018).”
- 4-OGC: Catalog of Gravitational Waves from Compact Binary Mergers (2021, background): “The redshift evolution of the BBH merger rate in local comoving time and space coordinates is also given as a power law (Fishbach et al. 2018) ( ) ( )= + kR z R z10 , where R0 defines the local merger rate density at z= 0 and κ represents the power-law index.”
- Constraints on the Cosmic Expansion History from GWTC–3 (2021, background): “(4) The above rate evolution model is more complex than that in Fishbach et al. (2018); Abbott et al. (2021c,d); this is because when we vary the cosmological parameters, the GW observations may be pushed to higher redshift z > 2, past the peak of the star formation rate (Madau & Dickinson 2014).”