Constraints from Gravitational-wave Detections of Binary Black Hole Mergers on the 12C(α, γ)16O Rate
By R. Farmer, M. Renzo, Selma de Mink, Maya Fishbach, S. Justham. Astrophysical Journal, 2020
155 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Gravitational-wave detections are starting to allow us to probe the physical processes in the evolution of very massive stars through the imprints they leave on their final remnants. Stellar evolution theory predicts the existence of a gap in the black hole mass distribution at high mass due to the effects of pair instability. Previously, we showed that the location of the gap is robust against model uncertainties, but it does depend sensitively on the uncertain rate. This rate is of great astrophysical significance and governs the production of oxygen at the expense of carbon. We use the open-source MESA stellar evolution code to evolve massive helium stars to probe the location of the mass gap. We find that the maximum black hole mass below the gap varies between and , depending on the strength of the uncertain reaction rate. With the first 10 gravitational-wave detections of black holes, we constrain the astrophysical S-factor for , at , to at 68% confidence. With detected binary black hole mergers, we expect to constrain the S-factor to within ±10–30 . We also highlight a role for independent constraints from electromagnetic transient surveys. The unambiguous detection of pulsational pair-instability supernovae would imply that . Degeneracies with other model uncertainties need to be investigated further, but probing nuclear stellar astrophysics poses a promising science case for the future gravitational-wave detectors.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9947e2c1ffc35af17bd94e6c5361f77f66706fd6
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Evidence for Hierarchical Black Hole Mergers in the Second LIGO–Virgo Gravitational Wave Catalog (2020, background): “…process either limits the maximum mass of the progenitor star’s core or completely disrupts the star entirely (Fryer et al. 2001; Heger & Woosley 2002; Belczynski et al. 2016; Spera & Mapelli 2017; Farmer et al. 2019; Stevenson et al. 2019; Farmer et al. 2020; Woosley & Heger 2021).”
- One Channel to Rule Them All? Constraining the Origins of Binary Black Holes Using Multiple Formation Pathways (2020, background): “…2019; Arca Sedda & Benacquista 2019; Powell et al. 2019; Arca Sedda et al. 2020; Baibhav et al. 2020; Safarzadeh 2020; Kimball et al. 2020a; Farmer et al. 2020; Bouffanais et al. 2020; Roulet et al. 2020; Hall et al. 2020; Antonini & Gieles 2020a; Abbott et al. 2020c; Bavera et al. 2020a;…”
- Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, background): “electron-capture supernovae and (pulsational) pair-instability supernovae are important for coalescing compact object formation (e.g., Belczynski et al., 2018b; Stevenson et al., 2019; Farmer et al., 2020).”
- GW231123: A Binary Black Hole Merger with Total Mass 190–265 M⊙ (2025, unknown): “Uncer-tainties in nuclear reaction rates alone can shift the lower edge of the pair-instability mass gap from ≈ 50 M ⊙ to ≈ 100 M ⊙ (Farmer et al. 2020).”