Related papers: Constraining black-hole spins with gravitational w…
Advanced LIGO and Virgo have detected ten binary black hole mergers by the end of their second observing run. These mergers have already allowed constraints to be placed on the population distribution of black holes in the Universe, which…
A population of binary black hole mergers has now been observed in gravitational waves by Advanced LIGO and Virgo. The masses of these black holes appear to show evidence for a pile-up between $30$--$45$ $M_\odot$ and a cut-off above $\sim…
The dynamical formation of stellar-mass black hole-black hole binaries has long been a promising source of gravitational waves for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Mass segregation, gravitational focusing, and…
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…
Binary black holes can form efficiently in dense young stellar clusters, such as the progenitors of globular clusters, via a combination of gravitational segregation and cluster evaporation. We use simple analytic arguments supported by…
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…
We report here the non-detection of gravitational waves from the merger of binary neutron star systems and neutron-star--black-hole systems during the first observing run of Advanced LIGO. In particular we searched for gravitational wave…
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…
Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo's newly-released GWTC-2 catalog of gravitational-wave detections offers unprecedented information about the spin magnitudes and orientations of merging binary black holes (BBHs). Notably, analysis of the BBH…
We compare binary evolution models with different assumptions about black-hole natal kicks to the first gravitational-wave observations performed by the LIGO detectors. Our comparisons attempt to reconcile merger rate, masses, spins, and…
We explore the predictions for detectable gravitational-wave signals from merging binary black holes formed through chemically homogeneous evolution in massive short-period stellar binaries. We find that $\sim 500$ events per year could be…
Recent breakthroughs in the field of numerical relativity have led to dramatic progress in understanding the predictions of General Relativity for the dynamical interactions of two black holes in the regime of very strong gravitational…
If a significant fraction of dark matter is in the form of compact objects, they will cause microlensing effects in the gravitational wave (GW) signals observable by LIGO and Virgo. From the non-observation of microlensing signatures in the…
The LIGO and Virgo detectors have directly observed gravitational waves from mergers of pairs of stellar-mass black holes, along with a smaller number of mergers involving neutron stars. These observations raise the hope that compact object…
The relation between the mass and spin of stellar-mass binary black holes (BBHs) has been proposed to be a smoking gun for the presence of multiple formation channels for compact objects. First-generation black holes (BHs) formed by…
We present the first numerical simulations of an initially non-spinning black-hole binary with mass ratio as large as 10:1 in full general relativity. The binary completes approximately 3 orbits prior to merger and radiates about 0.415% of…
The future space-based gravitational wave detector LISA will be able to measure parameters of coalescing massive black hole binaries, often to extremely high accuracy. Previous work has demonstrated that the black hole spins can have a…
We study the spin dynamics of individual black holes in a binary system. In particular we focus on the polar precession of spins and the possibility of a complete flip of spins with respect to the orbital plane. We perform a full numerical…
Motivated by the possibility of observing gravitational waves from merging black holes whose spins are nearly extremal (i.e., 1 in dimensionless units), we present numerical waveforms from simulations of merging black holes with the highest…
The recent advanced LIGO detections of gravitational waves from merging binary black holes enhance the prospect of exploring binary evolution via gravitational-wave observations of a population of compact-object binaries. In the face of…