Binary Black Hole Mergers in the First Advanced LIGO Observing Run

By The Ligo Scientific Collaboration, T. Abbott, R. Abbott, T. Abbott, M. Abernathy, F. Acernese, K. Ackley, C. Adams, T. Adams, P. Addesso and 963 more. 2016

1,097 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The first observational run of the Advanced LIGO detectors, from September 12, 2015 to January 19, 2016, saw the first detections of gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers. In this paper we present full results from a search for binary black hole merger signals with total masses up to 100M⊙ and detailed implications from our observations of these systems. Our search, based on general-relativistic models of gravitational wave signals from binary black hole systems, unambiguously identified two signals, GW150914 and GW151226, with a significance of greater than 5σ over the observing period. It also identified a third possible signal, LVT151012, with substantially lower significance, which has a 87% probability of being of astrophysical origin. We provide detailed estimates of the parameters of the observed systems. Both GW150914 and GW151226 provide an unprecedented opportunity to study the two-body motion of a compact-object binary in the large velocity, highly nonlinear regime. We do not observe any deviations from general relativity, and place improved empirical bounds on several high-order post-Newtonian coefficients. From our observations we infer stellar-mass binary black hole merger rates lying in the range 9−240Gpc−3yr−1. These observations are beginning to inform astrophysical predictions of binary black hole formation rates, and indicate that future observing runs of the Advanced detector network will yield many more gravitational wave detections.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/94f4592d01b0aab240dc0102ecb30bf1e1553c24

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Michela Mapelli
2. D. Holz
3. Ilya Mandel
4. Mario Spera
5. N. Giacobbo
6. Maya Fishbach
7. F. Rasio
8. Emanuele Berti

Citations in the corpus

• Search for sub-solar mass ultracompact binaries in Advanced LIGO's second observing run (2019, background): “[43] BP Abbott, R Abbott, TD Abbott, MR Abernathy, F Acernese, K Ackley, C Adams, T Adams, P Addesso, RX Adhikari, et al.”
• Unveiling the gravitational universe at μ-Hz frequencies (2019, background): “hole binaries (BHBs, [5, 6]) and from a neutron star (NS) binary (NSB, [3]), this latter accompanied by spectacular electromagnetic (EM) emission visible at all wavelengths [4].”
• Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger (2017, methodology): “For comparison, GW150914 was observed with a signal-to-noise ratio of 24(Abbott et al. 2016c).”
• Measuring the Binary Black Hole Mass Spectrum with an Astrophysically Motivated Parameterization (2018, methodology): “Accounting for these factors, we calculate Vobs(Θ), the sensitive volume for a binary with parameters Θ, following Abbott et al. (2016c), using semianalytic noise models corresponding to different sensitivities (Abbott et al. 2016e).”
• Radiation Backgrounds at Cosmic Dawn: X-Rays from Compact Binaries (2016, background): “During its first observing run, Advanced LIGO has observed gravitational waves from the coalescence of two binary black hole systems, GW150914 and GW151226, with a third likely candidate, LVT151012 (Abbott et al. 2016).”
• Deep Learning for Real-time Gravitational Wave Detection and Parameter Estimation with Advanced LIGO Data (2017, methodology): “on The detection of gravitational waves (GWs) from the merger of binary black holes (BBHs), and the subsequent detections of neutron star mergers, by LIGO [1] has set in motion a scientific revolution [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. However, matched-filtering, the most sensitive search algorithm used by LIGO, tar”
• GW190521: Orbital Eccentricity and Signatures of Dynamical Formation in a Binary Black Hole Merger Signal (2020, background): “The remnants of binary black hole merger events can have masses within the PISN mass (see, e.g., Abbott et al. 2016a; Fishbach et al. 2017; Chatziioannou et al. 2019; Kimball et al. 2019, 2020).”