English

GW200115: a non-spinning black hole -- neutron star merger

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2021-11-24 v2 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

GW200115 was the second merger of a black hole and a neutron star confidently detected through gravitational waves. Inference on the signal allows for a large black hole spin misaligned with the orbital angular momentum, but shows little support for aligned spin values. We show that this is a natural consequence of measuring the parameters of a black hole -- neutron star binary with non-spinning components while assuming the priors used in the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA analysis. We suggest that, a priori, a non-spinning binary is more consistent with current astrophysical understanding.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.14759,
  title  = {GW200115: a non-spinning black hole -- neutron star merger},
  author = {Ilya Mandel and Rory J. E. Smith},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.14759},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Minor updates to the version accepted to ApJ Letters