Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2022
Volume 67, Number 6
Saturday–Tuesday, April 9–12, 2022; New York
Session B15: Gravitational Wave Populations: Black Hole Mass & Spin DistributionsRecordings Available Undergrad Friendly
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Sponsoring Units: DAP DGRAV Chair: Carl Rodriguez, Carnegie Mellon University Room: Soho |
Saturday, April 9, 2022 10:45AM - 10:57AM |
B15.00001: Semi-Parametric Heirarchical Inference of LIGO-Virgos Binary Black Hole Mass Distribution Bruce Edelman, Zoheyr Doctor, Ben Farr The LIGO and Virgo detectors have now detected nearly a hundred gravitational waves, originating from merging compact binaries, which contain information about the properties of each of the merging objects such as their masses and spins. With a catalog of observed merging compact binaries, one can infer their collective population properties through heirarchical inference, producing population probability distributions over the objects source parameters. In this talk I will motivate the need to move towards semi-parametric models, capable of fitting unexpected features, in our inferences of the distiribution of black hole masses. I will conclude by highlighting one such model based on cubic splines and present the results from applying this specific model to infer the binary black hole mass spectrum using both the second and third gravitational-wave transient catalogs (GWTC-2, GWTC-3). |
Saturday, April 9, 2022 10:57AM - 11:09AM |
B15.00002: Characterizing the observation bias in gravitational-wave detections and finding structured population properties Doga Veske, Szabolcs Marka, Zsuzsanna Marka, Imre Bartos The observed distributions of the source properties from gravitational-wave detections are biased due to the selection effects and detection criteria in the detections, analogous to the Malmquist bias. In this work, this observation bias is investigated through its fundamental statistical and physical origins. An efficient semi-analytical formulation for its estimation is derived, which is as accurate as the standard method of numerical simulations, with only a millionth of the computational cost. Then, the estimated bias is used for unmodeled inferences on the binary black hole population. These inferences show additional structures, specifically two peaks in the joint mass distribution around binary masses ∼10 M⊙ and ∼30 M⊙. |
Saturday, April 9, 2022 11:09AM - 11:21AM |
B15.00003: Growing pains: preparing for gravitational-wave astronomy at scale Colm Talbot, Salvatore Vitale In the six years since the first detection of gravitational waves, the number of observed gravitational-wave transient signals has increased to nearly 100. This expanding population has enabled many new insights ranging from stellar astrophysics to cosmology and strong-field tests of general relativity. Most of these measurements rely on combining information from the entire catalog of mergers to constrain the underlying physics. However, the methods used suffer from a range of computational issues and are not suited to analyzing large numbers of events. Further, with the current catalog of events, we cannot resolve narrow features in the population models due to failures of our analysis methods. In this talk, I will provide an example of how new techniques can help us to probe extreme distributions of black hole spins. |
Saturday, April 9, 2022 11:21AM - 11:33AM |
B15.00004: Surprises from gravitational-wave spin measurements Salvatore Vitale, Vijay Varma, Andrea S Biscoveanu, Maximiliano Isi, Carl-Johan O Haster, Will M Farr, Thomas A Callister, Ken K Ng Hierarchical analysis of the binary black hole (BBH) detections by the Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors has offered an increasingly clear picture of their mass, spin, and redshift distributions. Fully understanding the formation and evolution of BBH mergers will require not just the characterization of these marginal distributions, though, but the discovery of any correlations that exist between the properties of BBHs. Here, we present two analyses performed on recent LIGO-Virgo data. First, we show that the mass ratio and the effective inspiral spins of binary black holes are anti-correlated. While many proposed astrophysical formation channels predict some degree correlation between spins and mass ratio, these predicted correlations typically act in an opposite sense to the trend we observationally identify in the data. Then, we report tentative evidence - based on the first part of the third observing run - that the BBH spin vectors are oriented in resonant configurations. This conclusion is somewhat dependent on the prior used for the analysis, implying that more data will be necessary to confirm these findings. |
Saturday, April 9, 2022 11:33AM - 11:45AM |
B15.00005: Population measurements of the binary black hole effective spin after LIGO/Virgo's O3 observing run Simona J Miller, Thomas A Callister, Katerina Chatziioannou Upon the conclusion of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo's third observing run (O3), we now have over 70 cataloged binary black hole (BBH) mergers. From these detections, we can continue to measure the distribution of spin across the BBH population, a property which is essential to understanding the astrophysical origins of these systems and how they evolve over time. I will discuss what we can infer in particular about the so-called effective and precessing spins of the known BBH population following O3. Using Bayesian hierarchical inference, I fit several different parameterized models to the population, beginning with simplistic unimodal distributions and then expanding to fit for possible extra underlying features. |
Saturday, April 9, 2022 11:45AM - 11:57AM |
B15.00006: Gravitational-wave populations and black-hole spin time travel Davide Gerosa, Matthew Mould Population studies of stellar-mass black-hole binaries have become major players in gravitational-wave astronomy. The underlying assumptions are that the targeted source parameters refer to the same quantities for all events in the catalog and are included when modeling selection effects. Both these points have so far been neglected when estimating the orientations of the black-hole spins. In particular, the detector-frame gravitational-wave frequency used to define frequency-dependent quantities (e.g., 20 Hz) introduces an inconsistent reference between events at the population level. We solve both issues by modeling binary black-hole populations and selection effects at past time infinity, corresponding to the well-defined reference frequency of 0 Hz. We show that, while current gravitational-wave measurement uncertainties obfuscate the influence of reference frequency in population inference, ignoring spins when estimating selection effects leads to an over-prediction of spin alignment in the underlying astrophysical distribution of merging black holes. |
Saturday, April 9, 2022 11:57AM - 12:09PM |
B15.00007: Binary black hole mass distribution, the non-parametric way Stefano Rinaldi The understanding of binary black holes formation has profound implications for stellar evolution. Gravitational waves (GWs) provide a window onto the final stages of the life of compact binaries and hence make it possible to infer the astrophysical properties, like masses and spins, of these systems. |
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