Related papers: What's in a binary black hole's mass parameter?
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…
Stellar mass black holes are formed in the field, and are observed in binaries. Population synthesis estimates for the formation of BH-PSR binaries suggest these may be observed, but with very large formal uncertainties in the formation…
The tidal acceleration experienced by an object at the event horizon of a black hole decreases as one over the square of the black hole's mass. As such there is a maximum mass at which a black hole can tidally disrupt an object outside of…
Recent work paints a conflicting portrait of the distribution of black hole spins in merging binaries measured with gravitational waves. Some analyses find that a significant fraction of merging binaries contain at least one black hole with…
The spin properties of merging black holes observed with gravitational waves can offer novel information about the origin of these systems. The magnitude and orientations of black hole spins offer a record of binaries' evolutionary history,…
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…
So far essentially all black hole masses in X-ray binaries have been obtained by observing the companion star's velocity and light curves as functions of the orbital phase. However a major uncertainty is the estimate of the orbital…
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…
Hierarchical black hole (BH) mergers are one of the most straightforward mechanisms to produce BHs inside and above the pair-instability mass gap. Here, we investigate the impact of globular cluster (GC) evolution on hierarchical mergers,…
With the recent release of the second gravitational-wave transient catalogue (GWTC-2), which introduced dozens of new detections, we are at a turning point of gravitational wave astronomy, as we are now able to directly infer constraints on…
The detection of gravitational waves has brought to light a population of binary black holes that merge within a Hubble time. Multiple formation channels can contribute to this population, making it difficult to definitively associate…
With the remarkable success of the LVK consortium in detecting binary black hole mergers, it has become possible to use the population properties to constrain our understanding of the progenitor stars' evolution. The most striking features…
Stellar evolution models predict the existence of a gap in the black hole mass spectrum from $\sim55 M_\odot - 120 M_\odot$ due to pair-instability supernovae (PISNe). We investigate the possible existence of such an "upper" mass gap in the…
Binary black hole systems (BBHs) have become a vivid reality in astrophysics as stellar-mass black hole mergers are now detected through their related gravitational wave emission during the merger stage. If many studies were recently…
Gravitational-wave detectors have opened a new window through which we can observe black holes (BHs) and neutron stars (NSs). Analyzing the 11 detections from LIGO/Virgo's first gravitational-wave catalog, GWTC-1, we investigate whether the…
We investigate how the properties of massive black hole binaries influence the observed properties of core galaxies. We compare the observed trend in stellar mass deficit as a function of total stellar mass in the core galaxy with predicted…
The environment surrounding supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galactic nuclei (GNs) is expected to harbour stellar-mass binary black hole (BBH) populations. These binaries were suggested to form a hierarchical triple system with the SMBH,…
Binary properties are usually expressed (for good observational reasons) as a function of primary mass. It has been found that the distribution of companion masses -- the mass ratio distribution -- is different for different primary masses.…
We analyze the mass distribution of stellar black holes derived from the light and radial velocity curves of optical stars in close binary systems using dynamical methods. The systematic errors inherent in this approach are discussed. These…
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…