Binary Black Hole Mergers from Globular Clusters: Masses, Merger Rates, and the Impact of Stellar Evolution

By C. Rodriguez, S. Chatterjee, F. Rasio. 2016

322 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The recent discovery of GW150914, the binary black hole merger detected by Advanced LIGO, has the potential to revolutionize observational astrophysics. But to fully utilize this new window into the universe, we must compare these new observations to detailed models of binary black hole formation throughout cosmic time. Expanding upon our previous work (Rodriguez et al., 2015), we study merging binary black holes formed in globular clusters using our Monte Carlo approach to stellar dynamics. We have created a new set of 52 cluster models with different masses, metallicities, and radii to fully characterize the binary black hole merger rate. These models include all the relevant dynamical processes (such as two-body relaxation, strong encounters, and three-body binary formation) and agree well with detailed direct N-body simulations. In addition, we have enhanced our stellar evolution algorithms with updated metallicity-dependent stellar wind and supernova prescriptions, allowing us to compare our results directly to the most recent population synthesis predictions for merger rates from isolated binary evolution. We explore the relationship between a cluster's global properties and the population of binary black holes that it produces. In particular, we derive a numerically calibrated relationship between the merger times of ejected black hole binaries and a cluster's mass and radius. We explore the masses and mass ratios of these binaries as a function of redshift, and find a merger rate of ~5 Gpc$^{-3}$ yr$^{-1}$ in the local universe, with 80% of sources having total masses from $32M_{\odot}$ to $64M_{\odot}$. Under standard assumptions, approximately 1 out of every 7 binary black hole mergers in the local universe will have originated in a globular cluster, but we also explore the sensitivity of this result to different assumptions for binary stellar evolution. [Abridged]

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d0e8ddd82bfaa49e9273a431ce605b8d25ceab0d

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Citations in the corpus

Deep Learning for Real-time Gravitational Wave Detection and Parameter Estimation with Advanced LIGO Data (2017, methodology): “cientiﬁc revolution [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. However, matched-ﬁltering, the most sensitive search algorithm used by LIGO, targets only a 3D parameter space (spin-aligned binaries on quasi-circular orbits) [8, 9, 10]—a subset of the over 8D parameter space of GW signals [11, 12, 13, 14]. Extending these s”
Black hole growth through hierarchical black hole mergers in dense star clusters: implications for gravitational wave detections (2018, methodology): “Numerical simulations based on Monte Carlo and N-body techniques (e.g., Zwart & McMillan 1999; Downing et al. 2010; Banerjee et al. 2010; Rodriguez et al. 2015, 2016; Askar et al. 2017; Samsing et al. 2018) have shown that such dynamically formed binaries could explain many, or perhaps even most,…”
Are LIGO's Black Holes Made from Smaller Black Holes? (2017, background): “If the BHs of each generation interact with each other dynamically, they are more likely to form binaries with BHs of similar mass (Sigurdsson & Hernquist 1993; Rodriguez et al. 2016b) and we would expect mergers of near-equal mass BHs (Rodriguez et al. 2016a; O’Leary et al. 2016).”
Black Hole Mergers in Galactic Nuclei Induced by the Eccentric Kozai–Lidov Effect (2017, background): “Our estimated merger rates for the GC and BW cases are on the same order as the merger rates estimated for globular clusters, 5 Gpc−3 yr−1 (Rodriguez et al. 2016a), isolated triples in galaxies 0.14–6Gpc−3yr−1 (Silsbee & Tremaine 2016), and mergers following close encounters of initially…”
COSMIC Variance in Binary Population Synthesis (2019, methodology): “As in Rodriguez et al. (2016), we adopt the methods of Dominik et al. (2013) where the high and low temperature prescriptions are extended to Teff = 25, 000 K. Wolf-Rayet star winds are treated according to Vink & de Koter (2005).”
The cosmic merger rate of neutron stars and black holes (2018, background): “…large impact on the merger rate of compact objects (see e.g. Portegies Zwart & McMillan 2000; Mapelli et al. 2013; Mapelli & Zampieri 2014; Ziosi et al. 2014; Rodriguez et al. 2015, 2016; Mapelli 2016; Askar et al. 2017; Kimpson et al. 2016; Banerjee 2017; Zevin et al. 2017; Fujii et al. 2017).”
Constraining Formation Models of Binary Black Holes with Gravitational-wave Observations (2017, methodology): “…through three-body encounters in dense star clusters such as globular clusters (e.g., Portegies Zwart & McMillan 2000; Downing et al. 2010, 2011; Rodriguez et al. 2016a, 2015), galactic nuclei and AGN disks (Antonini & Rasio 2016; Bartos et al. 2017; Stone et al. 2017), or young stellar…”
ILLUMINATING BLACK HOLE BINARY FORMATION CHANNELS WITH SPINS IN ADVANCED LIGO (2016, background): “…Mandel & De Mink 2016; Marchant et al. 2016), or the “dynamical” channel, in which BBHs are created though three-body encounters in dense star clusters (e.g., Sigurdsson & Hernquist 1993; Portegies Zwart & Mcmillan 2000; Downing et al. 2010, 2011; Ziosi et al. 2014; Rodriguez et al. 2015, 2016a).”
Greatly Enhanced Merger Rates of Compact-object Binaries in Non-spherical Nuclear Star Clusters (2017, background): “If we take ǫz = 0.3, we have ΓBH−BH ≈ 1 Gpc−3yr−1 for a canonical initial mass function.”
Black Hole Mergers From Globular Clusters Observable by LISA I: Eccentric Sources Originating From Relativistic N-body Dynamics (2018, background): “…and the three objects form a hierarchical triple ⋆ jsamsing@princeton.edu; daniel.dorazio@cfa.harvard.edu (e.g., Liu & Lai 2017; Antonini et al. 2017), whereas BBH mergers forming in clusters are expected to have randomized orientations due to frequent exchanges (e.g., Rodriguez et al. 2016c).”
Merging black holes in young star clusters (2019, background): “…et al. 2006; Sadowski et al. 2008; O’Leary et al. 2009; Downing et al. 2010, 2011; Mapelli et al. 2013; Mapelli & Zampieri 2014; Ziosi et al. 2014; Rodriguez et al. 2015, 2016; Antonini & Rasio 2016; Mapelli 2016; Kimpson et al. 2016; Hurley et al. 2016; O’Leary et al. 2016; Askar et al. 2017,…”
Lidov–Kozai Cycles with Gravitational Radiation: Merging Black Holes in Isolated Triple Systems (2016, background): “Black-hole binaries capable of merging in less than the age of the universe could also form dynamically in globular clusters (Rodriguez et al. 2016a).”