Related papers: Black Holes merging with Low Mass Gap Objects insi…
We are living through the dawn of the era of gravitational wave astronomy. Our first glances through this new window upon the sky has revealed a new population of objects. Since it first began observing in late 2015, the advanced Laser…
The detection of gravitational waves from coalescing binary neutron stars represents another milestone in gravitational-wave astronomy. However, since LIGO is currently not as sensitive to the merger/ringdown part of the waveform, the…
The LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors have uncovered binary black hole systems with definitively nonzero spins, as well as systems with significant spin residing in the more massive black hole of the pair. We investigate the…
We present the third Open Gravitational-wave Catalog (3-OGC) of compact-binary coalescences, based on the analysis of the public LIGO and Virgo data from 2015 through 2019 (O1, O2, O3a). Our updated catalog includes a population of 57…
Mergers of compact object binaries are one of the most powerful sources of gravitational waves (GWs) in the frequency range of second-generation ground-based gravitational wave detectors (Advanced LIGO and Virgo). Dynamical simulations of…
In current stellar evolutionary models, the occurrence of pair instability supernovae implies the lack of stellar black holes (BHs) with masses between about $[60, \, 120] \, \rm{M}_\odot$, resulting in the presence of an upper mass gap in…
The majority of gravitational wave (GW) events detected so far by LIGO/Virgo originate from binary black hole (BBH) mergers. Among the different binary evolution paths, the merger of BBHs in accretion discs of active galactic nuclei (AGNs)…
Among the four black hole binary merger events detected by LIGO, six progenitor black holes have masses greater than 20\,$M_\odot$. The existence of such massive BHs calls for extreme metal-poor stars as the progenitors. An alternative…
The detection of gravitational waves from the merger of binary black holes by the LIGO Collaboration has opened a new window to astrophysics. With the sensitivities of ground based detectors in the coming years we can only detect the local…
By probing the population of binary black hole (BBH) mergers detected by LIGO-Virgo, we can infer properties about the underlying black hole formation channels. A mechanism known as pair-instability (PI) supernova is expected to prevent the…
Cosmological simulations of galaxy formation can produce present-day galaxies with a large range of assembly and star formation histories. A detailed study of the metallicity evolution and star formation history of such simulations can…
The detection of an intermediate-mass black hole population ($10^2-10^6$ $M_{\odot}$) will provide clues to their formation environments (e.g., disks of active galactic nuclei, globular clusters) and illuminate a potential pathway to…
A promising channel for producing binary black hole mergers is the Lidov-Kozai orbital resonance in hierarchical triple systems. While this mechanism has been studied in isolation, the distribution of such mergers in time and across…
We examine the relationship between individual black hole (BH) masses in merging binary black hole (BBH) systems. Analyzing the ten BBH detections from LIGO/Virgo's first two observing runs, we find that the masses of the component BHs…
The origins of the stellar-mass black hole mergers discovered by LIGO/Virgo are still unknown. Here we show that, if migration traps develop in the \add{accretion} disks of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) and promote the mergers of their…
Almost a hundred compact binary mergers have been detected via gravitational waves by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration in the past few years providing us with a significant amount of new information on black holes and neutron stars. In…
We use the gravitational wave signals from binary black hole merger events observed by LIGO and Virgo to reconstruct the underlying mass and spin distributions of the population of merging black holes. We reconstruct the population using…
We address two important questions in gravitational-wave astronomy. What is the astrophysical formation scenario leading to black-hole binary mergers? Did some of the merging black holes form hierarchically through previous generations of…
Up to now several gravitational-wave events from the coalescences of black hole binaries have been reported by LIGO/VIRGO, and imply that black holes should have an extended mass function. We work out the merger rate distribution of…
In dense stellar systems the frequent dynamical interactions between stars play a crucial role in the formation and evolution of compact binaries. We study these processes using a novel approach combining a state-of-the-art binary…