Evidence for Hierarchical Black Hole Mergers in the Second LIGO–Virgo Gravitational Wave Catalog

Kimball, C.; Talbot, C.; Berry, C. P. L.; Zevin, M.; Thrane, E.; Kalogera, V.; Buscicchio, Riccardo; Carney, M. F.; Dent, T.; Middleton, H.; Payne, E.; Veitch, J.; Williams, Daniel

doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ac0aef

Cited by 126 publications

(82 citation statements)

References 98 publications

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“…Finally, we find that when we omit GW190521 the pollutant population power-law index d is unconstrained, and the normalization of the "pollutant" population λ is small, consistent with Kimball et al (2021). The fact that the posterior value of λ increases and the value of M BHMG decreases when our analysis includes GW190521 suggests that this event is substantially informative for inference of these values.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 74%

“…Black holes formed in prior binary black hole mergers (Bellovary et al 2016;Antonini et al 2019;Rodriguez et al 2019;Gerosa & Berti 2019;Di Carlo et al 2019;Yang et al 2019;Doctor et al 2020;Kimball et al 2020;McKernan et al 2020;González et al 2021;Fragione et al 2020;Weatherford et al 2021) are not captured by the isolated black hole mass function in Equation (3). These can produce significant numbers of black holes with mass larger than M BHMG (Miller & Hamilton 2002;Gerosa & Berti 2017;Rodriguez et al 2019;Zevin et al 2021;Kimball et al 2021;Rodriguez et al 2021). Assuming that the rate of black hole mergers is independent of the progenitor masses, second-generation black holes of mass M BH that form from the merger of two lighter first-generation black holes of mass M a , M b will be distributed according to…”

Section: Astrophysical Mass Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Find the Gap: Black Hole Population Analysis with an Astrophysically Motivated Mass Function

Baxter

Croon

McDermott

et al. 2021

ApJL

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We introduce a novel black hole mass function that realistically models the physics of pair-instability supernovae with a minimal number of parameters. Applying this to all events in the LIGO-Virgo Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog 2 (GWTC-2), we detect a peak at. Repeating the analysis without the black holes from the event GW190521, we find this feature at M BHMG = 54 ± 6 M e . These results establish the edge of the anticipated "black hole mass gap" at a value compatible with the expectation from standard stellar structure theory. The mass gap manifests itself as a discontinuity in the mass function and is populated by a distinct, less-abundant population of higher-mass black holes. We find that the primary black hole population scales with power-law index −1.95 ± 0.51 (−1.97 ± 0.44) with (without) GW190521, consistent with models of star formation. Using Bayesian techniques, we establish that our mass function fits a new catalog of black hole masses approximately as well as pre-existing phenomenological mass functions. We also remark on the implications of these results for constraining or discovering new phenomena in nuclear and particle physics. Unified Astronomy Thesaurus concepts: Astrophysical black holes (98); Black holes (162); Gravitational waves (678); Particle astrophysics (96); Gravitational wave astronomy (675); Nuclear astrophysics (1129); Stellar evolution (1599); Stellar populations (1622); Population III stars (1285); Helium burning (716)

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 74%

Section: Astrophysical Mass Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Find the Gap: Black Hole Population Analysis with an Astrophysically Motivated Mass Function

Baxter

Croon

McDermott

et al. 2021

ApJL

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“…The upper mass gap (UMG) It is difficult to populate the BH mass range of roughly ∼ 45M to ∼ 135M with stellar collapse because of pulsational pair instability and pair instability supernova [51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60]. An inferred BH mass in this range could indicate a hierarchical merger scenario [27,33,48,49,75,76,79,[114][115][116] (though this can be reasonably excluded if the BH has low spin [117,118]), or stars with spin and metallicity conditions tuned to allow gravitational collapse to a BH larger than 45 M [89,119,120] (this can push the bottom of the UMG up to 85 M in the most fine-tuned stellar environments [121]), or possibly even sustained and highly efficient accretion [122,123].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

New binary black hole mergers in the LIGO--Virgo O3a data

Olsen¹,

Venumadhav²,

Mushkin³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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We report the detection of ten new binary black hole (BBH) merger signals in the publicly released data from the the first half of the third observing run (O3a) of advanced LIGO and advanced Virgo. Candidates are identified using an updated version of the search pipeline described in Venumadhav et al.[1] (the "IAS pipeline" [2]), and events are declared according to criteria similar to those in the GWTC-2.1 catalog [3]. The updated search is sensitive to a larger region of parameter space, applies a template prior that accounts for different search volume as a function of intrinsic parameters, and uses an improved coherent detection statistic that optimally combines the data from the Hanford and Livingston detectors. Among the ten new events, we observe interesting astrophysical scenarios including sources with confidently large effective spin parameters in both the positive and negative directions, high-mass black holes that are difficult to form in stellar collapse models due to (pulsational) pair instability, and low-mass mergers that bridge the gap between neutron stars and the lightest observed black holes. We detect events populating the upper and lower black hole mass gaps with both extreme and near-unity mass ratios, and one of the possible neutron star-black hole (NSBH) mergers is well localized for electromagnetic (EM) counterpart searches. We see a substantial increase in significance for many of the events previously reported by other pipelines, and we detect all of the GWTC-2.1 BBH mergers with coincident data in Hanford and Livingston except for three loud events that get vetoed, which is compatible with the falsepositive rate of our veto procedure, and three that fall below the detection threshold. We also return to significance the event GW190909 114149, which was reduced to a sub-threshold trigger after its initial appearance in . This amounts to a total of 42 BBH mergers detected by our pipeline's search of the coincident Hanford-Livingston O3a data.

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“…Thus we suggest that a similar investigation for GW190403 − 0501519 should be carried out. Alternatively, GW190403 − 0501519 could contain two secondgeneration BHs, similar to GW190521 as in Kimball et al (2021).…”

Section: Comparisons Between Model Predictions and Observationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Angular Momentum Transport Efficiency within the Star Constrained from Gravitational-wave Observations

Qin,

Wang,

et al. 2021

Preprint

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The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration (LVC) have recently reported in GWTC-2.1 eight additional high-significance candidates with a probability of astrophysical origin greater than 0.5 in the LVC search on O3a running. In GWTC-2.1, the majority of the effective inspiral spins (χ eff ) show magnitudes consistent with zero, while two (GW190403 − 051519 and GW190805 − 211137) of the eight new events have χ eff > 0(at 90% credibility). We note that GW190403 − 051519 was reported with χ eff = 0.70 +0.15 −0.27 and mass ratio q = 0.25 +0.54 −0.11 , respectively. For binaries with very unequal masses, a stronger statements of spins can be made. In the case of GW190403 − 051519, its primary dimensionless spin, χ 1 = 0.92 +0.07 −0.22 , marks the fastest first-born black hole ever measured in all current gravitational-wave events. If we believe that GW190403 − 051519 formed through isolated binary evolution channel, this extremely high spin thus challenges the existence of efficient angular momentum transport mechanism, i.e., Spruit-Tayler (ST) dynamo (Spruit 2002), between the stellar core and its radiative envelopes of massive stars.

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Evidence for Hierarchical Black Hole Mergers in the Second LIGO–Virgo Gravitational Wave Catalog

Cited by 126 publications

References 98 publications

Find the Gap: Black Hole Population Analysis with an Astrophysically Motivated Mass Function

Find the Gap: Black Hole Population Analysis with an Astrophysically Motivated Mass Function

New binary black hole mergers in the LIGO--Virgo O3a data

On the Angular Momentum Transport Efficiency within the Star Constrained from Gravitational-wave Observations

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