THE RATE OF BINARY BLACK HOLE MERGERS INFERRED FROM ADVANCED LIGO OBSERVATIONS SURROUNDING GW150914

By The Ligo Scientific Collaboration, T. Abbott, R. Abbott, T. Abbott, M. Abernathy, F. Acernese, K. Ackley, C. Adams, T. Adams, P. Addesso and 954 more. 2016

317 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A transient gravitational-wave signal, GW150914, was identified in the twin Advanced LIGO detectors on 2015 September 2015 at 09:50:45 UTC. To assess the implications of this discovery, the detectors remained in operation with unchanged configurations over a period of 39 days around the time of the signal. At the detection statistic threshold corresponding to that observed for GW150914, our search of the 16 days of simultaneous two-detector observational data is estimated to have a false-alarm rate (FAR) of , yielding a p-value for GW150914 of . Parameter estimation follow-up on this trigger identifies its source as a binary black hole (BBH) merger with component masses at redshift (median and 90% credible range). Here, we report on the constraints these observations place on the rate of BBH coalescences. Considering only GW150914, assuming that all BBHs in the universe have the same masses and spins as this event, imposing a search FAR threshold of 1 per 100 years, and assuming that the BBH merger rate is constant in the comoving frame, we infer a 90% credible range of merger rates between (comoving frame). Incorporating all search triggers that pass a much lower threshold while accounting for the uncertainty in the astrophysical origin of each trigger, we estimate a higher rate, ranging from depending on assumptions about the BBH mass distribution. All together, our various rate estimates fall in the conservative range .

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d477dd0d828be3477fcd1965a61b74ebb1d56f78

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Michela Mapelli
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5. Maya Fishbach
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Citations in the corpus

• Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, methodology): “Observational constraints on the BBH merger rate(Abbott et al. 2016c, 2018a) generally assume a rate density that is uniform in the comoving volume.”
• Binary Black Hole Mergers from Field Triples: Properties, Rates, and the Impact of Stellar Evolution (2017, background): “The recent breakthrough detection of gravitational waves (GWs) from merging black hole (BH) binaries by Advanced-LIGO (aLIGO) has generated enormous interest in understanding how these sources form (Abbott et al. 2016a,b,c).”
• Probing the theory of gravity with gravitational lensing of gravitational waves and galaxy surveys (2019, background): “The exact event rates of these binary mergers are not yet known and are predicted from the current observation of the gravitational wave events Abbott et al. (2016b, 2017b).”
• Constraining Formation Models of Binary Black Holes with Gravitational-wave Observations (2017, methodology): “With expected BBH merger rates ranging from 12 to 213 Gpc − 3 yr − 1 (Abbott et al. 2016e, 2017 Two canonical formation channels are generally considered for contributing to the full population of BBHs: isolated binary evolution (i.e., “the field”) and dynamical formation (i.e., “clusters”).”
• Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics ( ): Convective Boundaries, Element Diffusion, and Massive Star Explosions (2017, background): “…new era, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has demonstrated the existence of binary stellar-mass black hole systems (Abbott et al. 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2017a, 2017b) and continues to monitor the sky with broadband detectors for gravitational waves from compact…”
• Where Are LIGO’s Big Black Holes? (2017, methodology): “Once we have samples from the posterior PDF, p ( m1,m2 | di ) , for each event (both real and simulated) and we have calculated the detection efficiency, Pdet(m1,m2) ∝ V T (m1,m2), we follow Appendix D in Abbott et al. (2016a) to fit Eq.”
• Greatly Enhanced Merger Rates of Compact-object Binaries in Non-spherical Nuclear Star Clusters (2017, background): “Particularly exciting is the possibility that many, or maybe even most, of the merging compact object binaries that are soon to be detected by Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) (Abbott et al. 2016a,b) are formed near MBHs through the LK mechanism (Antonini & Perets 2012; VanLandingham et al. 2016).”
• GW150914: The Advanced LIGO Detectors in the Era of First Discoveries (2016, background): “[8] B. P. Abbott et al. (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration), preceding Letter, GW150914: Implications for the Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background from Binary Black Holes, Phys.”
• Hierarchical analysis of gravitational-wave measurements of binary black hole spin–orbit misalignments (2017, methodology): “GW searches often assume BBHs have aligned spins as this simplification makes the search less computationally demanding (Abbott et al. 2016c).”