Merging stellar-mass binary black holes

By Ilya Mandel, A. Farmer. Physics reports, 2018

179 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The LIGO and Virgo detectors have recently directly observed gravitational waves from several mergers of pairs of stellar-mass black holes, as well as from one merging pair of neutron stars. These observations raise the hope that compact object mergers could be used as a probe of stellar and binary evolution, and perhaps of stellar dynamics. This colloquium-style article summarizes the existing observations, describes theoretical predictions for formation channels of merging stellar-mass black-hole binaries along with their rates and observable properties, and presents some of the prospects for gravitational-wave astronomy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac7b1c578a128f299de598c94372b85e8ca091c7