Astrophysical Implications of the Binary Black-Hole Merger GW150914

By The Ligo Scientific Collaboration, The Virgo Collaboration. 2016

294 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The discovery of the gravitational-wave source GW150914 with the Advanced LIGO detectors provides the first observational evidence for the existence of binary black-hole systems that inspiral and merge within the age of the Universe. Such black-hole mergers have been predicted in two main types of formation models, involving isolated binaries in galactic fields or dynamical interactions in young and old dense stellar environments. The measured masses robustly demonstrate that relatively"heavy"black holes ($\gtrsim 25\, M_\odot$) can form in nature. This discovery implies relatively weak massive-star winds and thus the formation of GW150914 in an environment with metallicity lower than $\sim 1/2$ of the solar value. The rate of binary black-hole mergers inferred from the observation of GW150914 is consistent with the higher end of rate predictions ($\gtrsim 1 \, \mathrm{Gpc}^{-3} \, \mathrm{yr}^{-1}$) from both types of formation models. The low measured redshift ($z \sim 0.1$) of GW150914 and the low inferred metallicity of the stellar progenitor imply either binary black-hole formation in a low-mass galaxy in the local Universe and a prompt merger, or formation at high redshift with a time delay between formation and merger of several Gyr. This discovery motivates further studies of binary-black-hole formation astrophysics. It also has implications for future detections and studies by Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo, and gravitational-wave detectors in space.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b3f8040602ad0ea03b1da0772c5a785c0f25f392

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Citations in the corpus

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Unequal mass binary neutron star mergers and multimessenger signals (2016, background): “[8, 9]), discuss possible mechanisms to explain the rather large stellar masses extracted from the signal (e.”
Probing ultralight bosons with binary black holes (2018, background): “Binary searches can then broadly be divided into two classes: i) binaries of comparable masses, q ∈ [10−2, 102], and ii) EMRIs, with q ∈ [10−6, 10−2] ∪ [102, 106].”
Massive Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter and their detection with Gravitational Waves (2017, background): “The masses of these black holes are somewhat larger than expected from remnants of supernovae explosions and stellar evolution [5, 7], so it is possible that LIGO has discovered a whole new population of massive black holes, formed in the early universe.”
Primordial black hole dark matter from single field inflation (2017, background): “2 We emphasize that all the bounds come with various (1)Large (> 30M ) BH masses are often said to be somewhat higher than those that were expected to be detected first by LIGO according standard formation scenarios [4].”
Primordial Black Hole Scenario for the Gravitational-Wave Event GW150914. (2016, background): “Although there are several possible explanations for the origin of those BHs as well as the formation of the binaries (see [2] and references therein), the answer is yet to be elucidated.”
The first gravitational-wave source from the isolated evolution of two stars in the 40–100 solar mass range (2016, methodology): “ range of interesting effects. Fourth, our observations are severely statistically limited. We are attempting to draw inferences about our models based on a single detection (GW150914). In was argued (51) that the formation of GW150914 in isolated binary evolution requires a metallicity lower than 5”