Hierarchical analysis of gravitational-wave measurements of binary black hole spin–orbit misalignments
By Simon Stevenson, C. Berry, Ilya Mandel. 2017
172 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Binary black holes may form both through isolated binary evolution and through dynamical interactions in dense stellar environments. The formation channel leaves an imprint on the alignment between the black hole spins and the orbital angular momentum. Gravitational waves from these systems directly encode information about the spin--orbit misalignment angles, allowing them to be (weakly) constrained. Identifying sub-populations of spinning binary black holes will inform us about compact binary formation and evolution. We simulate a mixed population of binary black holes with spin--orbit misalignments modelled under a range of assumptions. We then develop a hierarchical analysis and apply it to mock gravitational-wave observations of these populations. Assuming a population with dimensionless spin magnitudes of $\chi = 0.7$, we show that tens of observations will make it possible to distinguish the presence of subpopulations of coalescing binary black holes based on their spin orientations. With $100$ observations it will be possible to infer the relative fraction of coalescing binary black holes with isotropic spin directions (corresponding to dynamical formation in our models) with a fractional uncertainty of $\sim 40\%$. Meanwhile, only $\sim 5$ observations are sufficient to distinguish between extreme models---all binary black holes either having exactly aligned spins or isotropic spin directions.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ocean Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9ddb59afb7edfcd416cc17d76e2f9f81b5ffbd6d
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
In Ocean Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, background): “Despite these degeneracies, several tests have been proposed to use spins to constrain BBH formation channels(Farr et al. 2017, 2018; Gerosa & Berti 2017; Stevenson et al. 2017a; Talbot & Thrane 2017; Vitale et al. 2017; Gerosa et al. 2018; Wysocki et al. 2018).”
- Constraining Formation Models of Binary Black Holes with Gravitational-wave Observations (2017, background): “Multiple studies, such as Stevenson et al. (2017a) and Vitale et al. (2017), have also found that inference us-ing spin distributions can converge on branching ratios with a similar number of GW observations.”
- One Channel to Rule Them All? Constraining the Origins of Binary Black Holes Using Multiple Formation Pathways (2020, background): “…fractions between these channels or constrain uncertain physical processes governing these channels (Stevenson et al. 2015; Rodriguez et al. 2016b; Stevenson et al. 2017; Vitale et al. 2017; Mandel et al. 2017; Zevin et al. 2017; Talbot & Thrane 2017; Farr et al. 2017a,b; Barrett et al. 2018;…”
- Measuring the Binary Black Hole Mass Spectrum with an Astrophysically Motivated Parameterization (2018, methodology): “These works range from comparing gravitationalwave data to specific, non-parameterized models (Mandel & O’Shaughnessy 2010; Dominik et al. 2015; Stevenson et al. 2015, 2017a; Belczynski et al. 2016, 2017; Barrett et al. 2017; Farr et al. 2017; Miyamoto et al. 2017; Wysocki et al. 2018; Zevin et al.…”
- The cosmic merger rate of stellar black hole binaries from the Illustris simulation (2017, methodology): “Future observations by LIGO-Virgo will likely allow us to put constraints on the natal kicks of BHs (Vitale et al. 2017a,b; Stevenson et al. 2017; Zevin et al. 2017).”
- Are LIGO's Black Holes Made from Smaller Black Holes? (2017, methodology): “Following Stevenson et al. (2017), we approximate each spin magnitude posterior p(a j,i|di) ( j = {1,2}) as a Gaussian, restricted to the range [0,1], with a standard deviation σ j,i corresponding to the measurement uncertainty.”
- Progenitors of gravitational wave mergers: binary evolution with the stellar grid-based code ComBinE (2018, background): “The other four LIGO events need low metallicities (see lower panel) to obtain their larger BH masses, as also concluded by many other studies (e.g. Belczynski et al. 2016; Eldridge & Stanway 2016; Rodriguez et al. 2016b; Stevenson et al. 2017a).”
- Most Black Holes Are Born Very Slowly Rotating (2019, background): “While Qin et al. (2018a) and Bavera et al. (2019) predict a more continuous distribution, future detections will help distinguish different evolutionary pathways (Stevenson et al. 2017; Talbot & Thrane 2017; Farr et al. 2018; Gerosa et al. 2018).”
- COSMIC Variance in Binary Population Synthesis (2019, background): “Different binary evolution prescriptions are applied to these fitting formulae to develop BPS codes, such as Scenario Machine (Lipunov et al. 1996a,b, 2009), IBiS (Tutukov & Yungelson 1996, and references therin), BSE (Hurley et al. 2002), SeBa (Portegies Zwart & Verbunt 1996; Nelemans et al. 2001; ”
- GWTC-1: A Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First and Second Observing Runs (2018, background): “Several studies [166 – 169, 220 – 225] The third observing run ( O 3 ) of Advanced LIGO and Virgo began on April 1, 2019.”
- Eccentric Black Hole Mergers in Dense Star Clusters: The Role of Binary–Binary Encounters (2018, background): “…much attention has been focused on the BH spin orientations as a means to discriminate different BBH formation channels (Rodriguez et al. 2016b; Stevenson et al. 2017; Talbot & Thrane 2017; Vitale et al. 2017; Farr et al. 2017a,b; Gerosa et al. 2018; Sedda & Benacquista 2018; Schrøder et al.…”