Related papers: Are the observed black hole mergers spins consiste…
The first directly detected gravitational waves (GW 150914) were emitted by two coalescing black holes (BHs) with masses of ~36Msun and ~29Msun. Several scenarios have been proposed to put this detection into an astrophysical context. The…
The latest detection of GW231123, a binary black hole (BH) merger with exceptionally large masses and high spins for the incoming components, has been suggested as a smoking gun for hierarchical formation. In this scenario, a first…
Using recent results from numerical relativity simulations of black hole mergers, we revisit previous studies of cosmological black hole spin evolution. We show that mergers are very unlikely to yield large spins, unless alignment of the…
Angular momentum transport in high-mass stars is commonly modeled by extrapolating the behavior of better-observed low-mass stars. According to the conventional picture, the cores of most black hole progenitors lose almost all of their…
The heaviest black holes discovered through gravitational waves have masses that are difficult to explain with current standard stellar models. This discrepancy may be due to a series of hierarchical mergers, where the observed black holes…
In dense stellar environments, the merger products of binary black hole mergers may undergo additional mergers. These hierarchical mergers are predicted to have higher masses than the first generation of black holes made from stars. The…
Observations of gravitational waves (GWs) from merging compact binaries have become a regular occurrence. The continued advancement of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration detectors have now produced a catalog of over 90 such mergers,…
The origin of black hole mergers discovered by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave observatories is currently unknown. GW190521 is the heaviest black hole merger detected so far. Its observed high mass and possible spin-induced orbital…
The recently reported binary black hole merger, GW231123, has unusual properties that make it hard to explain astrophysically. Parameter estimation studies are consistent with maximally spinning black holes and the dimensionless spin of the…
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…
On September 14, 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detected a gravitational-wave transient (GW150914); we characterize the properties of the source and its parameters. The data around the time of the event…
We reanalyse the LIGO-Virgo strain data of the 10 binary black hole mergers reported to date and compute the likelihood function in terms of chirp mass, mass ratio and effective spin. We discuss the strong degeneracy between mass ratio and…
Gravitational wave observations indicate the existence of merging black holes (BHs) with high spin ($a\gtrsim0.3$), whose formation pathways are still an open question. A possible way to form those binaries is through the tidal spin-up of a…
Various binary black hole formation channels have been proposed since the first gravitational event GW150914 was discovered by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (AdLIGO). For all evolutionary channels based on…
With nearly a hundred gravitational wave detections, the origin of black hole mergers has become a key question. Here, we focus on understanding the typical galactic environment in which binary black hole mergers arise. To this end, we…
Recently discovered bursts of gravitational waves provide a good opportunity to verify the current view on the evolution of close binary stars. Modern population synthesis computer programs help to study this evolution from two main…
The merger of stellar-mass black holes (BHs) is not expected to generate detectable electromagnetic (EM) emission. However, the gravitational wave (GW) events GW150914 and GW170104, detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave…
Two of the dominant channels to produce merging stellar-mass black-hole binaries are believed to be the isolated evolution of binary stars in the field and dynamical formation in star clusters. The first reported black-hole binary event…
The recent detection of GW230529 suggests that black hole-neutron star mergers may involve low-mass black holes, potentially producing detectable electromagnetic counterparts. Motivated by this, we perform eleven fully general-relativistic…
The identification of the first confirmed neutron star - black hole (NS-BH) binary mergers by the LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA collaboration provides the opportunity to investigate the properties of the early sample of confirmed and candidate…