GW190814: Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 23 M$_\odot$ Black Hole with a 2.6 M$_\odot$ Compact Object

By The Ligo Scientific Collaboration, T. Abbott, T. Abbott, S. Abraham, F. Acernese, K. Ackley, C. Adams, Rana X. Adhikari, V. Adya, C. Affeldt and 1,242 more. 2020

638 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report the observation of a compact binary coalescence involving a 22.2 - 24.3 $M_{\odot}$ black hole and a compact object with a mass of 2.50 - 2.67 $M_{\odot}$ (all measurements quoted at the 90$\%$ credible level). The gravitational-wave signal, GW190814, was observed during LIGO's and Virgo's third observing run on August 14, 2019 at 21:10:39 UTC and has a signal-to-noise ratio of 25 in the three-detector network. The source was localized to 18.5 deg$^2$ at a distance of $241^{+41}_{-45}$ Mpc; no electromagnetic counterpart has been confirmed to date. The source has the most unequal mass ratio yet measured with gravitational waves, $0.112^{+0.008}_{-0.009}$, and its secondary component is either the lightest black hole or the heaviest neutron star ever discovered in a double compact-object system. The dimensionless spin of the primary black hole is tightly constrained to $\leq 0.07$. Tests of general relativity reveal no measurable deviations from the theory, and its prediction of higher-multipole emission is confirmed at high confidence. We estimate a merger rate density of 1-23 Gpc$^{-3}$ yr$^{-1}$ for the new class of binary coalescence sources that GW190814 represents. Astrophysical models predict that binaries with mass ratios similar to this event can form through several channels, but are unlikely to have formed in globular clusters. However, the combination of mass ratio, component masses, and the inferred merger rate for this event challenges all current models for the formation and mass distribution of compact-object binaries.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b0824b3e7ecd21832bea68bdd94d7f7d72f9cfa

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

Citations in the corpus

GW231123: A Binary Black Hole Merger with Total Mass 190–265 M⊙ (2025, positive): “The ringdown-dominated signals of high-mass BBH mergers can be mimicked by waveforms from the collapse of cosmic strings (Abbott et al. 2020f; Au-rrekoetxea et al. 2024) and collisions of exotic compact objects (e.g. boson stars) (Calder´on Bustillo et al. 2021b; Siemonsen & East 2023; Evstafyeva…”
4-OGC: Catalog of Gravitational Waves from Compact Binary Mergers (2021, background): “This period has seen continued improvement in their astrophysical reach over their three completed observing runs (O1–O3; Abbott et al. 2020b), with the pace rapidly increasing from three merger observations in O1 to dozens in the first half of O3 (O3a; Abbott et al. 2019a, 2021a, 2021c; Venumadhav…”
Open Data from the Third Observing Run of LIGO, Virgo, KAGRA, and GEO (2023, methodology): “An overview of LIGO / Virgo detector noise and some applicable signal processing methods are described in Abbott et al. ( 2020c ) ; see also above in Sections 3.2 and 2.3 for a brief introduction to various classes of detector noise.”
Observation of Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 2.5–4.5 M ⊙ Compact Object and a Neutron Star (2024, methodology): “We follow the procedure introduced in the context of GW190814 (Abbott et al. 2020c; Essick & Landry 2020), which relied on only the maximum neutron star mass, and has subsequently been extended to include the effects of spin (Abbott et al. 2020c, 2021a, 2023b).”
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, neutral): “VII.”