New binary black hole mergers in the second observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo
By T. Venumadhav, B. Zackay, Javier Roulet, Liang Dai, M. Zaldarriaga. Physical Review D, 2019
218 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We report the detection of new binary black hole merger events in the publicly available data from the second observing run of advanced LIGO and advanced Virgo (O2). The mergers were discovered using the new search pipeline described in Venumadhav et al. (1902.10341), and are above the detection thresholds as defined in Abbott et al. (1811.12907). Three of the mergers (GW170121, GW170304, GW170727) have inferred probabilities of being of astrophysical origin $p_{\rm astro} > 0.98$. The remaining three (GW170425, GW170202, GW170403) are less certain, with $p_{\rm astro}$ ranging from $0.5$ to $0.8$. The newly found mergers largely share the statistical properties of previously reported events, with the exception of GW170403, the least secure event, which has a highly negative effective spin parameter $\chi_{\rm eff}$. The most secure new event, GW170121 ($p_{\rm astro} > 0.99$), is also notable due to its inferred negative value of $\chi_{\rm eff}$, which is inconsistent with being positive at the $\approx 95.8\%$ confidence level. The new mergers nearly double the sample of gravitational wave events reported from O2, and present a substantial opportunity to explore the statistics of the binary black hole population in the Universe. The increase in volume is larger when the constituent detectors of the network have very different sensitivities, as is likely to be the case in current and future runs.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/840bd8f172b8d91636897e8137c38d2036d7c7c9
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Citations in the corpus
- GW190521: Orbital Eccentricity and Signatures of Dynamical Formation in a Binary Black Hole Merger Signal (2020, result): “Combining these with the results of Abbott et al. (2019a), Venumadhav et al. (2019, 2020), and Zackay et al. (2019), the total number of binary black holes observed in gravitational waves is 50( ).”
- The effect of the metallicity-specific star formation history on double compact object mergers (2019, background): “We do not include in our analysis the six additional BBH candidates found in the same data set by Venumadhav et al. (2019) with an independent search pipeline and somewhat different data quality choices.”
- Beyond the Standard Models with cosmic strings (2019, background): “And more events might still be discovered in the O2 data [173].”
- Formation and Evolution of Compact-object Binaries in AGN Disks (2019, background): “Recent detections of gravitational waves (GWs) have shown evidence for a high rate of black hole (BH)–BH and neutron star (NS)–NS mergers in the universe (Abbott et al. 2016a, 2016b, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2019a; Zackay et al. 2019, 2020; Venumadhav et al. 2020).”
- 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, methodology): “[13] Tejaswi Venumadhav, Barak Zackay, Javier Roulet, Liang Dai, and Matias Zaldarriaga, “New binary black hole mergers in the second observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo,” Phys.”
- Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, background): “Thirdly, details of search methodology and tuning can impact the set of detections, and independent searches over the publicly released LIGO-Virgo data have yielded slightly different source populations (e.g., Zackay et al., 2019; Venumadhav et al., 2020; Nitz et al., 2021).”
- GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run (2020, unknown): “[23,25] by independently developed searches [24,167].”
- Primordial black holes confront LIGO/Virgo data: current situation (2020, background): “[49, 50]; the red data points refer to GW151216 and GW170403, for which the measured value of χeff is significantly affected by the prior on the spin angles [51].”