Related papers: Poking Holes: Looking for Gaps in LIGO/Virgo's Bla…
We investigate secular evolution in hierarchical quadruple systems as a formation channel of mass-gap black holes (with masses of about $3-5$ $M_{\odot}$) in systems that will eventually lead to binary black hole mergers detectable by…
The degree of black-hole spin-orbit misalignment ("tilts") in the astrophysical population could be a powerful diagnostic to distinguish between binary formation in isolation, in dynamical environments, or in hierarchical triples. However,…
Recent population studies have searched for a subpopulation of primordial black holes (PBHs) in the gravitational-wave (GW) events so far detected by LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA (LVK), in most cases adopting a phenomenological PBH mass distribution.…
In a binary system, the gravitational potential of the primary black hole may play an important role in enhancing the fallback accretion onto the lighter compact object newly formed in the second supernova explosion. As a result, the final…
We explore possible systematic errors in the mass measurements of stellar mass black holes. We find that significant errors can arise from the assumption of zero or constant emission from the accretion flow, which is commonly used when…
We present new evolutionary models of primordial very massive stars, with initial masses ranging from $100\,\mathrm{{M}_{\odot}}$ to $1000\,\mathrm{{M}_{\odot}}$, that extend from the main sequence until the onset of dynamical instability…
The catalog of gravitational-wave events is growing, and so are our hopes of constraining the underlying astrophysics of stellar-mass black-hole mergers by inferring the distributions of, e.g., masses and spins. While conventional analyses…
The observation of gravitational-wave signals from merging black-hole binaries enables direct measurement of the properties of the black holes. An individual observation allows measurement of the black-hole masses, but only limited…
Gravitational-wave (GW) catalogs are rapidly increasing in number, allowing for robust statistical analyses of the population of compact binaries. Nonetheless, GW inference of cosmology has typically relied on additional electromagnetic…
Prior to the detection of black holes (BHs) via the gravitational waves (GWs) they generate at merger, the presence of BHs was inferred in X-ray binaries, mostly via dynamical measurements, with masses in the range between $\sim…
The mass distribution of compact objects provides a fossil record that can be studied to uncover information on the late stages of massive star evolution, the supernova explosion mechanism, and the dense matter equation of state.…
Observations of gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers, including the recent signals GW231123 and GW230529, have revealed multiple progenitor black holes in the so-called upper and lower mass gaps, respectively. It is generally…
Stellar-mass black holes descend from high-mass stars, most of which had stellar binary companions. However, the number of those binary systems that survive the binary evolution and black hole formation is uncertain by multiple orders of…
In this letter we focus on the peculiar case of a coalescing compact-object binary whose chirp mass is compatible both with a neutron star-neutron star and black hole-neutron star system, with the black hole in the $\sim 3-5M_\odot$ range…
Ninety gravitational wave events have been detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA network and are released in the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog. Among these events, 83 cases are definitely binary black hole mergers since the masses of all…
The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration has announced the detection of almost 100 binary black holes so far, which have been used in several studies to infer the features of the underlying binary black hole population. From these, it is possible…
We quantify the impact of finite catalog size, or "catalog variance," on current gravitational-wave population analyses. The distribution of merging binary black holes is commonly reconstructed via hierarchical Bayesian inference, with…
Whether intermediate-mass black holes reside in nearby star clusters has remained contested for decades. We address this question by training neural network and random forest regressors on synthetic catalogs generated with the {\sc Rapster}…
The detection of GW190521 by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration has revealed the existence of black holes (BHs) in the pair-instability (PI) mass gap. Here, we investigate the formation of BHs in the PI mass gap via star -- star collisions in…
Using ground-based gravitational-wave detectors, we probe the mass function of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) wherein we also include BHs in the upper mass gap $\sim 60-130~M_\odot$. Employing the projected sensitivity of the…