Properties of the Binary Neutron Star Merger GW170817

By The Ligo Scientific Collaboration, The Virgo Collaboration, B. Abbott, R. Abbott, T. Abbott, F. Acernese, K. Ackley, C. Adams, T. Adams, P. Addesso and 1,140 more. 2018

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On August 17, 2017, the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo gravitational-wave detectors observed a low-mass compact binary inspiral. The initial sky localization of the source of the gravitational-wave signal, GW170817, allowed electromagnetic observatories to identify NGC 4993 as the host galaxy. In this work, we improve initial estimates of the binary's properties, including component masses, spins, and tidal parameters, using the known source location, improved modeling, and recalibrated Virgo data. We extend the range of gravitational-wave frequencies considered down to 23 Hz, compared to 30 Hz in the initial analysis. We also compare results inferred using several signal models, which are more accurate and incorporate additional physical effects as compared to the initial analysis. We improve the localization of the gravitational-wave source to a 90% credible region of $16~\mathrm{deg}^2$. We find tighter constraints on the masses, spins, and tidal parameters, and continue to find no evidence for nonzero component spins. The component masses are inferred to lie between 1.00 and 1.89 $M_\odot$ when allowing for large component spins, and to lie between 1.16 and 1.60 $M_\odot$ (with a total mass $2.73^{+0.04}_{-0.01} \, M_\odot$) when the spins are restricted to be within the range observed in Galactic binary neutron stars. Under minimal assumptions about the nature of the compact objects, our constraints for the tidal deformability parameter $\tilde \Lambda$ are $(0,630)$ when we allow for large component spins, and $300^{+420}_{-230}$ (using a 90% highest posterior density interval) when restricting the magnitude of the component spins, ruling out several equation-of-state models at the 90% credible level. Finally, with LIGO and GEO600 data, we use a Bayesian analysis to place upper limits on the amplitude and spectral energy density of a possible post-merger signal. (Abridged)

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08fb7b94204bc326b7a1340b712bc6e26c46a556

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Citations in the corpus

New Neutron Star Equation of State with Quark–Hadron Crossover (2019, methodology): “As we show, QHC19 agrees strikingly well with the inference of the equation of state by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration from the binary neutron star merger event GW170817, and is fully consistent with their radius and tidal deformability determinations.”
Strangeness in nuclei and neutron stars (2020, background): “ching to perturbative QCD (pQCD) calculations at higher densities [366]. Interestingly, the recent discovery of gravitational waves emitted from two merging NSs from the LIGO and VIRGO collaborations [367, 368] has opened a new era in astrophysics. Gravitational waves from the late inspirals of NSs ”
GWTC-1: A Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First and Second Observing Runs (2018, methodology): “For the reanalysis of GW170817, we choose two different spin priors, consistent with previous analyses [18,97]: a i ≤ 0 .”
The Mass Distribution of Galactic Double Neutron Stars (2019, background): “More binary NS events are expected when Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO; Aasi et al. 2015) and Advanced Virgo (Acernese et al. 2015) detectors resume observing with improved sensitivity this year (Abbott et al. 2018).”
Multi-messenger astrophysics (2019, background): “The GWs in GW/GRB 170817 showed that this was a neutron star binary merger, providing a measurement of their masses, the distance [47] and gave constraints on the neutron star equation of state [48], while γ-ray and X-ray measurements by Fermi and Swift showed it was an off-axis short GRB, e.”