English

The Heavier the Faster: A Sub-population of Heavy, Rapidly Spinning and Quickly Evolving Binary Black Holes

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2024-06-06 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

The spins of binary black holes (BBHs) measured from gravitational waves carry notable information of the formation pathways. Here we propose a quantity "dimensionless net spin" (χN\chi_{\rm N}), which is related to the sum of angular momentum of component black holes in the system, to provide a novel perspective to study the origin(s) of BBHs. By performing hierarchical Bayesian inference on χN\chi_{\rm N}, we find strong evidence that the marginal distribution of this quantity can be better fitted by two Gaussian components rather than one: there is a narrow peak at χN0.15\chi_{\rm N} \sim 0.15 and another extended peak at χN0.47\chi_{\rm N} \sim 0.47. We also find that the rapidly spinning systems likely dominate the high-mass end of the population and they evolve with redshift much quicker. These findings bring new challenges to the field binary scenario, and suggest that dynamical process should plays a key role in forming high total mass BBHs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.03257,
  title  = {The Heavier the Faster: A Sub-population of Heavy, Rapidly Spinning and Quickly Evolving Binary Black Holes},
  author = {Wei-Hua Guo and Yin-Jie Li and Yuan-Zhu Wang and Yong Shao and Shichao Wu and Tao Zhu and Yi-Zhong Fan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.03257},
  year   = {2024}
}

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Submitted on 25 April 2024