Where Are LIGO’s Big Black Holes?

By Maya Fishbach, D. Holz. 2017

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In LIGO’s O1 and O2 observational runs, the detectors were sensitive to stellar-mass binary black hole (BBH) coalescences with component masses up to , with binaries with primary masses above representing ≳90% of the total accessible sensitive volume. Nonetheless, of the 5.9 detections (GW150914, LVT151012, GW151226, GW170104, GW170608, and GW170814) reported by LIGO-Virgo, the most massive binary detected was GW150914 with a primary component mass of , far below the detection mass limit. Furthermore, there are theoretical arguments in favor of an upper mass gap, predicting an absence of black holes in the mass range . We argue that the absence of detected binary systems with component masses heavier than may be preliminary evidence for this upper mass gap. By allowing for the presence of a mass gap, we find weaker constraints on the shape of the underlying mass distribution of BBHs. We fit a power-law distribution with an upper mass cutoff to real and simulated BBH mass measurements, finding that the first 3.9 BBHs favor shallow power-law slopes and an upper mass cutoff . This inferred distribution is entirely consistent with the two recently reported detections, GW170608 and GW170814. We show that with ∼10 additional LIGO-Virgo BBH detections, fitting the BH mass distribution will provide strong evidence for an upper mass gap if one exists.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f261462f8002e1d9a438300635cdb9c71349bda2

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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): “As a consequence of the lower mmax, the power-law index inferred is also shallower than previously obtained (Fishbach & Holz 2017) but remains consistent with the previous distribution.”
GWTC-2.1: Deep extended catalog of compact binary coalescences observed by LIGO and Virgo during the first half of the third observing run (2021, unknown): “6 M ⊙ [122,198,199].”
Two populations of LIGO-Virgo black holes (2020, background): “In addition, it is likely that there exists a mass gap for heavier astrophysical black holes (ABHs) [26–28], and the LIGO-Virgo data seems to be consistent with this hypothesis [29].”
Measuring the Binary Black Hole Mass Spectrum with an Astrophysically Motivated Parameterization (2018, methodology): “The inferred value of α is covariant with other parameters of the model; e.g., for the first four detections, decreasing the maximum black hole mass, decreases the inferred value of α (Fishbach & Holz 2017).”
Eccentric Black Hole Gravitational-wave Capture Sources in Galactic Nuclei: Distribution of Binary Parameters (2017, background): “The current GW detection limits of the heaviest black holes (Abbott et al. 2017e; Fishbach & Holz 2017) may be impacted by the inefficiency of the applied search algorithms to eccentric sources.”
A Future Percent-level Measurement of the Hubble Expansion at Redshift 0.8 with Advanced LIGO (2019, background): “The energy produced can either unbind the star, leaving no BH remnant, or drive a mass-loss pulse that reduces the mass of the star until the PISN is halted, leading to remnant masses ~ M45 (this latter process is called the pulsational pair instability supernova (PPISN)).”
Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, background): “Derivations of how to do such calculations are provided by, e.g., Belczynski et al. (2014) and de Mink and Mandel (2016); both analytical fits (e.g., Fishbach and Holz 2017) and numerical codes (e.g., Gerosa 2017; Team COMPAS 2021) are available.”
One Channel to Rule Them All? Constraining the Origins of Binary Black Holes Using Multiple Formation Pathways (2020, methodology): “Though more computationally intensive than using analytical scaling relations that approximate the sensitive spacetime volume to leading order (e.g., Fishbach & Holz 2017), we choose to calculate detection probabilities numerically to better capture the influence that total mass, mass ratio, and…”
Extracting distribution parameters from multiple uncertain observations with selection biases (2018, background): “…black hole mergers observed by LIGO, this would be a strong effect as shallower mass functions give more higher-mass events, which are visible to greater distances and so a higher proportion of the total population lies within the LIGO detector horizon (see, for example, Fishbach & Holz (2017)).”
Constraints on the Cosmic Expansion History from GWTC–3 (2021, unknown): “The first phenomenological model, is the Truncated model, describes the mass distribution as a power law (PL) between a minimum mass mmin and a maximum mass mmax (Fishbach & Holz 2017).”
Bayesian inference for compact binary coalescences with bilby: validation and application to the first LIGO–Virgo gravitational-wave transient catalogue (2020, unknown): “…hole masses is p(m1|mmin,mmax, α) = (1− α) m−α1 m1−αmax −m1−αmin , p(q|m1,mmin, β) = (1 + β) m1+β1 q β m1+β1 −m 1+β min , (4) where mmin and mmax are the maximum and minimum allowed masses for the primary component, and α and β are power-law indices (Fishbach & Holz 2017; Abbott et al. 2019j).”
An introduction to Bayesian inference in gravitational-wave astronomy: Parameter estimation, model selection, and hierarchical models (2018, unknown): “…of black hole binaries (Vitale et al. 2017; Stevenson, Berry, & Mandel 2017; Talbot & Thrane 2017; Gerosa & Berti 2017; Farr et al. 2017; Wysocki, Lange, & O’Shaughnessy 2018; Lower et al. 2018), and to probe how stars die (Fishbach & Holz 2017; Talbot & Thrane 2018; Abbott et al. 2018 a ).”
GWTC-1: A Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First and Second Observing Runs (2018, background): “[222] M.”
GW190521: Orbital Eccentricity and Signatures of Dynamical Formation in a Binary Black Hole Merger Signal (2020, background): “The component masses and spins of a black hole binary can illuminate its formation history, as can its orbital eccentricity (e.g., Stevenson et al. 2015; Rodriguez et al. 2016; Farr et al. 2017; Fishbach & Holz 2017; Talbot & Thrane 2017; Vitale et al. 2017).”