Summary of Tests of General Relativity with the Binary Black Hole Signals from the LIGO-Virgo Catalog GWTC-1

By The Ligo Scientific Collaboration, T. Abbott, R. Abbott, T. Abbott, S. Abraham, F. Acernese, K. Ackley, C. Adams, Rana X. Adhikari, V. Adya and 1,133 more. 2019

262 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We summarize the four tests of general relativity carried out using the ten binary black hole signals detected by Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo and included in their first catalog, GWTC-1. These events provide unprecedented opportunities for testing the predictions of general relativity for the gravitational waveforms from these highly dynamical, strong-field events. The first two tests check the consistency of the residuals with noise and the consistency of the low- and high-frequency parts of the signal. The other two tests check that parameterized deviations in the waveform model---including in the post-Newtonian coefficients---are consistent with zero, and that the propagation of the waves is nondispersive. These tests reveal no evidence for deviations from general relativity, and the combined constraints improve previous results by factors of up to 2.4. We also check that the binary black hole signals observed by all three detectors do not give stronger constraints on alternative polarizations than those obtained from GW170817.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4cad9f1232f5bb92bca3398351705aaaa87c8ac

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Michela Mapelli
2. D. Holz
3. Mario Spera
4. Maya Fishbach
5. N. Giacobbo
6. Ilya Mandel
7. T. Bulik
8. E. Thrane

In Ocean Engineering

1. E. Thrane
2. Colm Talbot
3. Rana X. Adhikari
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6. Maya Fishbach
7. K. Chatziioannou
8. P. Jaranowski

Citations in the corpus

• Bayesian inference for compact binary coalescences with bilby: validation and application to the first LIGO–Virgo gravitational-wave transient catalogue (2020, methodology): “…Belczynski et al. 2018; Bavera et al. 2020), the equation of state of neutron-star matter (Abbott et al. 2018c; Most et al. 2018; Essick et al. 2020; Abbott et al. 2020b), and the nature of gravity (Yunes & Siemens 2013; Abbott et al. 2016b; Yunes et al. 2016; Abbott et al. 2019i; Isi et al. 2019).”
• GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run (2020, methodology): “The mass of the secondary component is consistent with masses of (previously) reported neutron stars [10,271,272,274], but the data are uninformative about potential tidal effects, showing essentially no difference between the prior and posterior on Λ2 obtained from NSBH waveforms SEOBNRv4_ROM_ NRTi”