Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo

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 1,128 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2018

768 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present results on the mass, spin, and redshift distributions with phenomenological population models using the 10 binary black hole (BBH) mergers detected in the first and second observing runs completed by Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. We constrain properties of the BBH mass spectrum using models with a range of parameterizations of the BBH mass and spin distributions. We find that the mass distribution of the more massive BH in such binaries is well approximated by models with no more than 1% of BHs more massive than 45 M ⊙ and a power-law index of α = 1.3 − 1.7 + 1.4 (90% credibility). We also show that BBHs are unlikely to be composed of BHs with large spins aligned to the orbital angular momentum. Modeling the evolution of the BBH merger rate with redshift, we show that it is flat or increasing with redshift with 93% probability. Marginalizing over uncertainties in the BBH population, we find robust estimates of the BBH merger rate density of R = 53.2 − 28.2 + 55.8 Gpc−3 yr−1 (90% credibility). As the BBH catalog grows in future observing runs, we expect that uncertainties in the population model parameters will shrink, potentially providing insights into the formation of BHs via supernovae, binary interactions of massive stars, stellar cluster dynamics, and the formation history of BHs across cosmic time.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/efbb3b01ef0f2c686cf27d3ba6cb60dbe8df9c41

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Citations in the corpus

Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, methodology): “Since then, nine more binary BH coalescences were observed during the first and second observing runs of advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors (Abbott et al., 2019b).”
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).”
Constraints on the Cosmic Expansion History from GWTC–3 (2021, methodology): “…the present-day matter density, Ωm, and dark energy EoS, w0, parameters are weak, we have measured the Hubble constant to be H0 = 68 +13 −7 km s −1 Mpc−1 at 68% CL from combining dark sirens with information from the bright siren GW170817 and its electromagnetic counterpart (Abbott et al. 2019b).”
Evolutionary roads leading to low effective spins, high black hole masses, and O1/O2 rates for LIGO/Virgo binary black holes (2017, methodology): “B) produce rates within the allowable range determined by the first 10 LIGO/Virgo detections (9.7−101 Gpc−3 yr−1: Abbott et al. 2019b).”
Surrogate models for precessing binary black hole simulations with unequal masses (2019, background): “As the LIGO [1] and Virgo [2] detectors reach their design sensitivity, gravitational wave (GW) detections [3– 9] are becoming routine [10, 11].”
One Channel to Rule Them All? Constraining the Origins of Binary Black Holes Using Multiple Formation Pathways (2020, methodology): “Analyses using phenomenological representations for the spin magnitude distribution show a preference for low spins (Farr et al. 2017b; Abbott et al. 2019b; Miller et al. 2020; Abbott et al. 2020c; Kimball et al. 2020b), in agreement with the preference for low natal spins in this work.”
The origin of spin in binary black holes (2019, background): “The merger rate predictions for the isolated binary evolution via the CE phase are consistent (Abbott et al. 2017a) with the observed rate of BBH mergers of around ∼24−112 Gpc−3 yr−1 (Abbott et al. 2019b).”