Related papers: Black-hole mergers in disklike environments could …
Observations have shown that the majority of massive stars, progenitors of black holes (BHs), have on average more than one stellar companion. In triple systems, wide inner binaries can be driven to a merger by the third body due to…
The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaborations have reported gravitational wave signals from more than 150 binary black holes in the fourth catalog (GWTC-4). Here, we investigate the population properties of these binary black holes using the…
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…
A promising signature of coalescing black holes is their spin angular distribution. We consider the aLIGO collaboration gravitational wave measurements of the binary black hole spins and the predicted modified gravity (MOG) preference for…
The deep connection between galaxies and their supermassive black holes is central to modern astrophysics and cosmology. The observed correlation between galaxy and black hole mass is usually attributed to the contribution of major mergers…
Measurements of black-hole spins are of crucial importance to fulfill the promise of gravitational-wave astronomy. On the astrophysics side, spins are perhaps the cleanest indicator of black-hole evolutionary processes, thus providing a…
Advanced LIGO \& Advanced Virgo are detecting a large number of binary stellar origin black hole (BH) mergers. A promising channel for accelerated BH merger lies in active galactic nucleus (AGN) disks of gas around super-masssive black…
The properties of the population of merging binary black holes encode some of the uncertain physics of the evolution of massive stars in binaries. The binary black hole merger rate and chirp mass distribution are being measured by…
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…
The merging black-hole (BH) binaries GW190412, GW190814 and GW190521 from the third LIGO/VIRGO observing run exhibit some extraordinary properties, including highly asymmetric masses, significant spin, and component mass in the "mass gap".…
Recent gravitational wave observations showed that binary black hole (BBH) mergers with massive components are more likely to have high effective spins. In the model of isolated binary evolution, BH spins mainly originate from the angular…
Stellar-mass binary black hole (BBH) mergers occurring within the disks of active galactic nuclei (AGN) are promising sources for gravitational waves detectable by the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA (LVK) interferometers. Some of these events have…
A gravitational wave (GW) signal carries imprints of the properties of its source. The ability to extract source properties crucially depends on our prior knowledge of the signal morphology. Even though binary black hole (BBH) mergers are…
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…
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…
This a particularly exciting time for gravitational wave physics. Ground-based gravitational wave detectors are now operating at a sensitivity such that gravitational radiation may soon be directly detected, and recently several groups have…
When a stellar binary encounters a spinning black hole, interesting phenomena might result due to the mutual interaction between the binary spin, orbital angular momentum and the black hole spin. Here we consider such encounters between an…
Interactions between a supermassive black hole binary and the surrounding accretion disc can both assist the binary inspiral and align the black hole spins to the disc angular momentum. While binary migration is due to angular-momentum…
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)…
We detail the population properties of merging compact objects using 158 mergers from the cumulative Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog 4.0, which includes three types of binary mergers: binary neutron star, neutron star--black hole…