The effect of the metallicity-specific star formation history on double compact object mergers

By Coenraad J. Neijssel, A. Vigna-Gómez, Simon Stevenson, Jim W. Barrett, Sebastian M. Gaebel, Floor Broekgaarden, S. E. de Mink, D. Szécsi, Serena Vinciguerra, Ilya Mandel. Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2019

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the impact of uncertainty in the metallicity-specific star formation rate over cosmic time on predictions of the rates and masses of double compact object mergers observable through gravitational waves. We find that this uncertainty can change the predicted detectable merger rate by more than an order of magnitude, comparable to contributions from uncertain physical assumptions regarding binary evolution, such as mass transfer efficiency or supernova kicks. We statistically compare the results produced by the COMPAS population synthesis suite against a catalogue of gravitational-wave detections from the first two Advanced LIGO and Virgo observing runs. We find that the rate and chirp mass of observed binary black hole mergers can be well matched under our default evolutionary model with a star formation metallicity spread of 0.39 dex around a mean metallicity 〈Z〉 that scales with redshift z as 〈Z〉 = 0.035 × 10−0.23z, assuming a star formation rate of $0.01 \times (1+z)^{2.77} / (1+((1+z)/2.9)^{4.7}) \, \rm {M}_\odot$ Mpc−3 yr−1. Intriguingly, this default model predicts that 80 per cent of the approximately one binary black hole merger per day that will be detectable at design sensitivity will have formed through isolated binary evolution with only dynamically stable mass transfer, i.e. without experiencing a common-envelope event.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/95f030caa1f4670fdf1ee33ca9cdcba2af3388c6

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Citations in the corpus

Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, background): “…and theory are making it possible to quantitatively compare rate predictions against observations for the first time (e.g., Abbott et al., 2019a, 2020f; Belczynski et al., 2018a; Wysocki et al., 2018; Neijssel et al., 2019; Bavera et al., 2021; Belczynski et al., 2020; Farmer et al., 2020).”
The origin of spin in binary black holes (2019, methodology): “The same holds for the stable mass transfer channel (Neijssel et al. 2019), while formation via chemically homogeneous evolution could yield tens of mergers per Gpc−3 yr−1 (Mandel & de Mink 2016; Marchant et al. 2016).”
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, unknown): “VII.”
Evolutionary roads leading to low effective spins, high black hole masses, and O1/O2 rates for LIGO/Virgo binary black holes (2017, background): “These two factors play an important role in setting the double compact object merger rates (Belczynski et al. 2010b; Dominik et al. 2013; Chruslinska et al. 2019; Neijssel et al. 2019).”
One Channel to Rule Them All? Constraining the Origins of Binary Black Holes Using Multiple Formation Pathways (2020, background): “However, theoretical models have shown that hardened BBH systems merging within a Hubble time can also form through late-phase stable mass transfer (van den Heuvel et al. 2017; Neijssel et al. 2019).”