GW150914: spin-based constraints on the merger time of the progenitor system

Kushnir, Doron; Zaldarriaga, Matías; Kollmeier, Juna A.; Waldman, Roni

doi:10.1093/mnras/stw1684

Cited by 131 publications

(148 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Future GW observations may provide the mass, spin, and redshift distributions of merging BBHs, which are useful to probe the environments where BBHs are formed (e.g., Kushnir et al 2016;Hotokezaka & Piran 2017;Farr et al 2017;Zaldarriaga et al 2017). Searching for electromagnetic (EM) counterparts from merging BBHs is another way to study them.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Outflow-driven Transients from the Birth of Binary Black Holes. I. Tidally Locked Secondary Supernovae

Kimura

Murase

Mészáros

2017

ApJ

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We propose a new type of electromagnetic transients associated with the birth of binary black holes (BBHs), which may lead to merger events accompanied by gravitational waves in ∼ 0.1 − 1 Gyr. We consider the newborn BBHs formed through the evolution of isolated massive stellar binaries. For a close massive binary, consisting of a primary black hole (BH) and a secondary Wolf-Rayet (WR) star that are orbiting around each other, the spin period of the WR star can be tidally synchronized to its orbital period. Then, the angular momentum of the outer material of the WR star is large enough to form an accretion disk around a newborn, secondary BH, following its core-collapse. This disk may produce an energetic outflow with a kinetic energy of ∼ 10 50 − 10 52 erg and an outflow velocity of ∼ 10 10 cm s −1 , resulting in an optical transient with an absolute magnitude from ∼ −14 to ∼ −17 with a duration of around a day. This type of transient also produces detectable radio signals ∼ 1 − 10 years after the birth of BBHs, via synchrotron emission from non-thermal electrons accelerated at external shocks. The predicted optical transients have a shorter duration than ordinary core-collapse supernovae. Dedicated optical transient surveys can detect them, and distinguish it from ordinary SNe using the different features of its light curve and late-time spectrum. In the paper I, we investigate disk-driven outflows from the secondary BH, whereas possible signals from the primary BH will be discussed in the paper II.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Outflow-driven Transients from the Birth of Binary Black Holes. I. Tidally Locked Secondary Supernovae

Kimura

Murase

Mészáros

2017

ApJ

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“…spin magnitude distribution of those black holes relative to the X-ray binary systems; for example, close tidal interactions could increase the spin magnitude of the core, and stripping of the envelope could reduce the available angular momentum [20][21][22] . The spin directions in isolated binary black holes [10][11][12][13][14] are usually expected to be preferentially aligned.…”

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confidence: 99%

Distinguishing spin-aligned and isotropic black hole populations with gravitational waves

Farr

Stevenson

Miller

et al. 2017

Nature

313

304

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The direct detection of gravitational waves 1-4 from merging binary black holes opens up a window into the environments in which binary black holes form. One signature of such environments is the angular distribution of the black hole spins. Binary systems that formed through dynamical interactions between alreadycompact objects are expected to have isotropic spin orientations [5][6][7][8][9] (that is, the spins of the black holes are randomly oriented with respect to the orbit of the binary system), whereas those that formed from pairs of stars born together are more likely to have spins that are preferentially aligned with the orbit [10][11][12][13][14] . The bestmeasured combination of spin parameters 3,4 for each of the four likely binary black hole detections GW150914, LVT151012, GW151226 and GW170104 is the 'effective' spin. Here we report that, if the magnitudes of the black hole spins are allowed to extend to high values, the effective spins for these systems indicate a 0.015 odds ratio against an aligned angular distribution compared to an isotropic one. When considering the effect of ten additional detections 15 , this odds ratio decreases to 2.9 × 10 −7 against alignment. The existing preference for either an isotropic spin distribution or low spin magnitudes for the observed systems will be confirmed (or overturned) confidently in the near future.After the detection of a merging binary black hole system, parameter estimation tools compare model gravitational waveforms against the observed data to obtain a posterior distribution on the parameters that describe the compact binary source. The spin parameter with the largest effect on waveforms, and a correspondingly tight constraint from the data 3 , is a mass-weighted combination of the components of the dimensionless spin vectors of the two black holes that are aligned with the orbital axis, referred to as the 'effective spin' − 1 < χ eff < 1 (see Methods section 'Distributions of effective spin and spin magnitude').In Fig. 1 we show an approximation to the posterior inferred on χ eff for the four likely gravitational wave detections GW150914, GW151226, GW170104 and LVT151012 from Advanced LIGO's first and second observing runs (O1 and O2) 3,4 . Because samples drawn from the posterior on χ eff are not publicly released at this time, we have approximated the posterior as a Gaussian distribution with the same mean and 90% credible interval, truncated to − 1 < χ eff < 1. None of the χ eff posteriors is consistent with two black holes with large aligned spins, χ 1,2  0.5; this contrasts with the large spins that are inferred for the majority of black holes in X-ray binaries with spin measurements 16 (see below). The analysis here is relatively insensitive to the precise details of the posterior distributions; other conclusions are more sensitive. In particular, our Gaussian approximation does permit χ eff = 0 for GW151226, whereas the true posterior rules this out at high confidence 2,3 . Small values of χ eff as exhibited in these systems can result fr...

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“…This observational fact has important evolutionary implications (see Kushnir et al (2016); Hotokezaka & Piran (2017)). It suggests a very slow rotation of BH progenitors, † The parameter χ ef f = (M1χ1 + M2χ2)/M , where χi = ai cos θi with θi being the angle between the angular momentum of the i-th BH and orbital angular momentum of the binary system.…”

Section: Low Spins Of Bh In Gw150914 and Ltv151012 Eventsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Progenitors of binary black hole mergers detected by LIGO

Постнов¹,

Куранов

2016

Proc. IAU

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Abstract. Possible formation mechanisms of massive close binary black holes that can merge in the Hubble time to produce powerful gravitational wave bursts detected during advanced LIGO O1 science run are briefly discussed. The pathways include the evolution from field lowmetallicity massive binaries, the dynamical formation in globular clusters and primordial black holes. Low effective black hole spins inferred for LIGO GW150914 and LTV151012 events are discussed. Population synthesis calculations of the expected spin and chirp mass distributions from the standard field massive binary formation channel are presented for different metallicities (from zero-metal Population III stars up to solar metal abundance). We conclude that that merging binary black holes can contain systems from different formation channels, discrimination between which can be made with increasing statistics of mass and spin measurements from ongoing and future gravitational wave observations.

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GW150914: spin-based constraints on the merger time of the progenitor system

Cited by 131 publications

References 34 publications

Outflow-driven Transients from the Birth of Binary Black Holes. I. Tidally Locked Secondary Supernovae

Outflow-driven Transients from the Birth of Binary Black Holes. I. Tidally Locked Secondary Supernovae

Distinguishing spin-aligned and isotropic black hole populations with gravitational waves

Progenitors of binary black hole mergers detected by LIGO

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