Merging black hole binaries: the effects of progenitor's metallicity, mass-loss rate and Eddington factor

By N. Giacobbo, Michela Mapelli, Mario Spera. 2017

207 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The first four gravitational wave events detected by LIGO were all interpreted as merging black hole binaries (BHBs), opening a new perspective on the study of such systems. Here we use our new population-synthesis code MOBSE, an upgraded version of BSE (Hurley et al. 2002), to investigate the demography of merging BHBs. MOBSE includes metallicity-dependent prescriptions for mass loss of massive hot stars. It also accounts for the impact of the electron-scattering Eddington factor on mass loss. We perform >10^8 simulations of isolated massive binaries, with 12 different metallicities, to study the impact of mass loss, core-collapse supernovae and common envelope on merging BHBs. Accounting for the dependence of stellar winds on the Eddington factor leads to the formation of black holes (BHs) with mass up to 65 Msun at metallicity Z~0.0002. However, most BHs in merging BHBs have masses 0.6 are more likely. We predict that systems like GW150914, GW170814 and GW170104 can form only from progenitors with metallicity Z<=0.006, Z<=0.008 and Z<=0.012, respectively. Most merging BHBs have gone through a common envelope phase, but up to ~17 per cent merging BHBs at low metallicity did not undergo any common envelope phase. We find a much higher number of mergers from metal-poor progenitors than from metal-rich ones: the number of BHB mergers per unit mass is ~10^-4 Msun^-1 at low metallicity (Z = 0.0002 - 0.002) and drops to ~10^-7 Msun^-1 at high metallicity (Z ~ 0.02).

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/886106b95e4696a312f9c9dcee1c47b7d976bb0a

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. N. Giacobbo
2. Michela Mapelli
3. Mario Spera
4. F. Haardt
5. G. Costa
6. A. Trani
7. Floor Broekgaarden
8. Ilya Mandel

Citations in the corpus

• The origin of spin in binary black holes (2019, background): “…the BBH system can coalesce into a single, more massive BH. Previous theoretical works focused on the first few observed GW events suggest that these BBHs are consistent with having been formed through the CE formation channel (Stevenson et al. 2017; Giacobbo et al. 2018; Kruckow et al. 2018).”
• Merging black holes in young star clusters (2019, methodology): “…2017; de Mink & Belczynski 2015; de Mink & Mandel 2016; Marchant et al. 2016; Belczynski et al. 2016a; Chruslinska et al. 2018; Mapelli et al. 2017; Giacobbo et al. 2018; Giacobbo & Mapelli 2018, 2019; Mapelli & Giacobbo 2018; Mapelli et al. 2018; Kruckow et al. 2018; Shao & Li 2018; Spera et al.…”
• The effect of the metallicity-specific star formation history on double compact object mergers (2019, background): “As previously pointed out by Belczynski et al. (2010), Giacobbo et al. (2018), Spera et al. (2018), BBH yield is particularly sensitive to metallicity with a steep decline in BBH production at higher metallicities.”
• The progenitors of compact-object binaries: impact of metallicity, common envelope and natal kicks (2018, methodology): “Here, we have implemented in MOBSE the possibility to draw the natal kick from two Maxwellian curves with a different root-mean-square: σCCSN and σECSN, for corecollapse and electron-capture SNe, respectively.”
• Merging black hole binaries with the SEVN code (2018, methodology): “We compute Ncor, BHB following the formula given in Giacobbo et al. (2018): Ncor,BHB = fbinfIMF Nmergers,BHB Mtot , (25) where Nmergers, BHB is the number of merging BHBs, Mtot is the total initial mass of the simulated stellar population, fIMF corrects for the fact that we have simulated only…”
• Progenitors of gravitational wave mergers: binary evolution with the stellar grid-based code ComBinE (2018, unknown): “…et al. 2013, 2015; Chruslinska et al. 2018), binary c (Izzard et al. 2004, 2006, 2009, 2018), BPASS (Eldridge & Stanway 2016; Eldridge et al. 2017), COMPAS (Stevenson et al. 2017a; Barrett et al. 2017; Vigna-Gómez et al. 2018), MOBSE (Mapelli et al. 2017; Giacobbo et al. 2018) and many more.”