THE EFFECT OF METALLICITY ON THE DETECTION PROSPECTS FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVES

By Krzysztof Belczyński, M. Dominik, T. Bulik, R. O’Shaughnessy, Chris L. Fryer, D. Holz. 2010

208 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (∼300,000 galaxies) indicate that recent star formation (within the last 1 billion years) is bimodal: half of the stars form from gas with high amounts of metals (solar metallicity) and the other half form with small contribution of elements heavier than helium (∼10%–30% solar). Theoretical studies of mass loss from the brightest stars derive significantly higher stellar-origin black hole (BH) masses (∼30–80 M☉) than previously estimated for sub-solar compositions. We combine these findings to estimate the probability of detecting gravitational waves (GWs) arising from the inspiral of double compact objects. Our results show that a low-metallicity environment significantly boosts the formation of double compact object binaries with at least one BH. In particular, we find the GW detection rate is increased by a factor of 20 if the metallicity is decreased from solar (as in all previous estimates) to a 50–50 mixture of solar and 10% solar metallicity. The current sensitivity of the two largest instruments to neutron star–neutron star (NS–NS) binary inspirals (VIRGO: ∼9 Mpc; LIGO: ∼18) is not high enough to ensure a first detection. However, our results indicate that if a future instrument increased the sensitivity to ∼50–100 Mpc, a detection of GWs would be expected within the first year of observation. It was previously thought that NS–NS inspirals were the most likely source for GW detection. Our results indicate that BH–BH binaries are ∼25 times more likely sources than NS–NS systems and that we are on the cusp of GW detection.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3de9bdb23c9d81a1a126248174b7f02d9638387

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Citations in the corpus

THE EFFECT OF STARBURST METALLICITY ON BRIGHT X-RAY BINARY FORMATION PATHWAYS (2010, methodology): “We also employ a revised model for wind accretion from massive stars (Belczynski et al. (2010), which employs modifications to adapt for the results of Vink et al. (2001)).”
ILLUMINATING BLACK HOLE BINARY FORMATION CHANNELS WITH SPINS IN ADVANCED LIGO (2016, background): “In addition, our version of BSE contains several modifications to low-metallicitiy stellar winds (Vink et al. 2001; Belczynski et al. 2010) and core-collapse supernova (SN) (Fryer et al. 2012) required to form “heavy” BBHs such as GW150914 (Abbott et al. 2016b).”
DOUBLE COMPACT OBJECTS. II. COSMOLOGICAL MERGER RATES (2013, methodology): “This has been shown to have a significant impact on the number of DCOs, altering the merger rates by orders of magnitude (Belczynski et al. 2007, 2010b).”
Black hole growth through hierarchical black hole mergers in dense star clusters: implications for gravitational wave detections (2018, methodology): “Our models adopt the updated prescriptions for stellar winds and mass loss, in order to replicate the BH mass distribution of Dominik et al. (2013) and Belczynski et al. (2010), but include updated prescriptions for the pulsational pair-instability in massive stars (Belczynski et al. 2016).”
ASTROPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE BINARY BLACK HOLE MERGER GW150914 (2016, methodology): “Quantitatively, Belczynski et al. (2010a) and later Mapelli et al. (2013) and Spera et al. (2015) showed that adopting the latest wind prescriptions(Vink 2008) significantly increases the stellar mass at core collapse and thus the maximum BH mass that can form from single stars, although the exact…”
Binary Black Hole Mergers from Field Triples: Properties, Rates, and the Impact of Stellar Evolution (2017, background): “Binary BHs can form as the result of: (i) the evolution of isolated massive binaries in galactic fields (Belczynski et al. 2010, 2016; Mandel & de Mink 2016); (ii) dynamical interactions in galactic nuclei, with and without a massive BH (Antonini & Perets 2012; Antonini & Rasio 2016); (iii)…”
BPASS predictions for binary black hole mergers (2016, background): “…neutron star-neutron star (NSNS) mergers expected to be more common (if less luminous) sources at LIGO frequencies and sensitivities (e.g. Abadie et al. 2010; Berry et al. 2015), although it was predicted by some that BH-BH mergers would be more likely (Belczynski et al. 2010; Dominik et al. 2015).”
Massive double compact object mergers: gravitational wave sources and r-process element production sites (2013, background): “For the low metallicity, we find that BH+NS LIGO detection rates increase by a factor of three (in line with the findings of Belczynski et al. 2010a), while NS+NS detection rates drop by a factor of eight, compared to Solar metal- tory, galaxy mass distribution and galaxy redshift-metallicity…”
DOUBLE COMPACT OBJECTS. I. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COMMON ENVELOPE ON MERGER RATES (2012, methodology): “3) to almost none or none at all (direct collapse into a BH) and makes the SN significantly less disruptive, as explained in detail by Belczynski et al. (2010b).”
COMPACT BINARY MERGER RATES: COMPARISON WITH LIGO/VIRGO UPPER LIMITS (2015, methodology): “However, once we incorporate this very strong dependence into cosmological models of the Universe and employ a broad spectrum of metallicities (as in our methods II and III), the merger rate density predictions are not as strongly affected.”
The effect of pair-instability mass loss on black-hole mergers (2016, background): “This may be contrasted with earlier predictions that the maximum mass of black holes can reach 80−130 M in the evolution of Population I/II stars with modest initial masses of Mzams < 150 M (Zampieri & Roberts 2009; Mapelli et al. 2009; Belczynski et al. 2010a; Spera et al. 2015, 2016).”
The chemically homogeneous evolutionary channel for binary black hole mergers: rates and properties of gravitational-wave events detectable by advanced LIGO (2016, result): “…gravitational-wave signals of binary black hole mergers would potentially dominate LIGO observations (e.g. Lipunov et al. 1997; Voss & Tauris 2003; Belczynski et al. 2010; Dominik et al. 2015), but these analyses also demonstrated the significant uncertainties in these predictions (e.g. Dominik…”
Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, background): “Therefore, the local merger rate is sensitive to the poorly known metallicity-specific star formation rate at high redshifts (Belczynski et al., 2010; Mapelli et al., 2017; Klencki et al., 2018; Chruslinska et al., 2019; Neijssel et al., 2019; Chruslinska and Nelemans, 2019; Tang et al., 2020;…”
A new route towards merging massive black holes (2016, background): “…in which close double compact binaries are produced through common-envelope evolution (see Appendix B), except for a few cases (Voss & Tauris 2003; Belczynski et al. 2010; Dominik et al. 2015), the far majority of published population synthesis studies predict a much higher NS+NS merger rate per…”
MERGING BLACK HOLE BINARIES IN GALACTIC NUCLEI: IMPLICATIONS FOR ADVANCED-LIGO DETECTIONS (2016, methodology): “Our models adopt the update prescriptions for stellar winds and supernova fallback, in order to replicate the BH mass distribution of Dominik et al. (2013) and Belczynski et al. (2010).”