Two populations of LIGO-Virgo black holes

By Gert Hütsi, M. Raidal, V. Vaskonen, H. Veermae. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2020

207 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyse the LIGO-Virgo data, including the recently released GWTC-2dataset, to test a hypothesis that the data contains more than one population of black holes. We perform a maximum likelihood analysis including a population of astrophysical black holes with a truncated power-law mass function whose merger rate follows from star formation rate, and a population of primordial black holes for which we consider log-normal and critical collapse mass functions. We find that primordial black holes alone are strongly disfavoured by the data, while the best fit is obtained for the template combining astrophysical and primordial merger rates. Alternatively, the data may hint towards two different astrophysical black hole populations. We also update the constraints on primordial black hole abundance from LIGO-Virgo observations finding that in the 2–400 mass range they must comprise less than 0.2% of dark matter.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/73b15f24a26a630cb73fe0ec1536dc73c9b06fe5

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Pablo Villanueva-Domingo
2. S. Palomares-Ruiz
3. O. Mena
4. S. Vagnozzi

Citations in the corpus

• A Brief Review on Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter (2021, background): “(2020), and a mixed population seems compatible or even favored (Hütsi et al., 2021).”