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The mass ratio of merging binary black holes (BBHs) carries information about their formation history, yet has received less attention than masses, spins and eccentricities as a channel discriminator. We derive a strongly parametrized…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-05-25 Jaxen Godfrey , Lieke van Son , Ben Farr

The evolution of the supermassive Black Hole (BH) population across cosmic times remains a central unresolved issue in modern astrophysics, due to the many noticeable uncertainties in the involved physical processes that span a huge range…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2025-12-05 Andrea Lapi , Francesco Shankar , Michele Bosi , Daniel Roberts , Hao Fu , Karthik M. Varadarajan , Lumen Boco

Gravitational-wave observations of binary black hole (BBH) systems point to black hole spin magnitudes being relatively low. These measurements appear in tension with high spin measurements for high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs). We use grids…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2022-10-20 Monica Gallegos-Garcia , Maya Fishbach , Vicky Kalogera , Christopher P L Berry , Zoheyr Doctor

We introduce a population model to analyze the mixing between hypothesised power-law and $\sim 35 M_\odot$ Gaussian bump black hole populations in the latest gravitational wave catalog, GWTC-3, estimating their co-location and separation.…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2024-08-20 Ming-Feng Ho , Scott Ellis Perkins , Simeon Bird , William Dawson , Nathan Golovich , Jessica R. Lu , Peter McGill

The active galactic nucleus (AGN) accretion disks are ideal sites for hierarchical black hole (BH) mergers. To robustly probe such a possibility, we analyze binary black hole mergers in the GWTC-4 with a flexible mixture population model…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-09-30 Yin-Jie Li , Yuan-Zhu Wang , Shao-Peng Tang , Yi-Zhong Fan

Hierarchical mergers of black holes are proposed as a mechanism to explain the observations of binary black holes with component masses between $\sim 50M_{\odot}\hbox{--}130M_{\odot}$ by LIGO/Virgo, often referred to as "upper mass gap". We…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-01-23 Parthapratim Mahapatra , Debatri Chattopadhyay , Anuradha Gupta , Marc Favata , B. S. Sathyaprakash , K. G. Arun

The gravitational wave (GW) signal from binary black hole (BBH) mergers is a promising probe of Population III (Pop III) stars. To fully unleash the power of the GW probe, one important step is to understand the relative importance and…

We investigate the population properties of binary black holes (BBHs) from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, focusing especially on those in the high-mass range, using the newly released GWTC-4 catalog. For the first time, we search for a…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-05-12 Fan-Xiao-Yu Xia , Yuan-Zhu Wang , Ying Qin

The recent discovery of the binary black hole (BBH) merger event GW190521, between two black holes (BHs) of $\approx100M_\odot$, and as well as other massive BBH merger events involving BHs within the pair-instability supernova (PSN) mass…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2022-09-07 Sambaran Banerjee

Analyses of the growing catalog of binary black hole (BBH) mergers observed by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detectors are beginning to resolve features in their population-level mass, spin, and redshift distributions, revealing imprints of the…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-05-26 April Qiu Cheng , Alexandre Toubiana , Sylvia Biscoveanu , Jonathan Gair

We explore the possibility that the recently detected black hole binary (BHB) merger event GW190521 originates from the first generation of massive, metal-free, so-called Population III (Pop III), stars. Based on improved binary statistics…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-11-18 Boyuan Liu , Volker Bromm

Population III stars, born from the primordial gas in the Universe, lose a negligible fraction of their mass via stellar winds and possibly follow a top-heavy mass function. Hence, they have often been regarded as the ideal progenitors of…

We perform a binary population synthesis calculation incorporating very massive population (Pop.) III stars up to 1500 $M_\odot$, and investigate the nature of binary black hole (BBH) mergers. Above the pair-instability mass gap, we find…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2021-05-26 Kotaro Hijikawa , Ataru Tanikawa , Tomoya Kinugawa , Takashi Yoshida , Hideyuki Umeda

We investigate properties of black hole (BH) binaries formed in globular clusters via dynamical processes, using direct N-body simulations. We pay attention to effects of BH mass function on the total mass and mass ratio distributions of BH…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2017-05-12 Dawoo Park , Chunglee Kim , Hyung Mok Lee , Yeong-Bok Bae , Chris Belczynski

The fourth gravitational wave transient catalog~(GWTC-4) has enabled empirical probes of the theorized pair-instability gap in the higher end of the binary black hole~(BBH) mass-spectrum. In this letter, using flexibly parametrized models,…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-04-02 Anarya Ray , Vicky Kalogera

Several astrophysical scenarios have been proposed to explain the origin of the population of binary black hole (BBH) mergers detected in gravitational waves (GWs) by the LIGO/Virgo Collaboration. Among them, BBH mergers assembled…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2021-06-08 Giacomo Fragione , Sambaran Banerjee

Gravitational wave detectors are observing an increasing number of binary black hole (BBH) mergers, revealing a bimodal mass distribution of BBHs, which hints at diverse formation histories for these systems. Using the rapid binary…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-10-10 Lei Li , Guoliang Lv , Chunhua Zhu , Sufen Guo , Hongwei Ge , Weimin Gu , Zhuowen Li , Xiaolong He

Theoretical predictions suggest that very massive stars have the potential to form through multiple collisions and eventually evolve into intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) within Population III star clusters embedded in mini dark matter…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-09-04 Shuai Liu , Long Wang , Yi-Ming Hu , Ataru Tanikawa , Alessandro A. Trani

The growing database of gravitational-wave (GW) detections with the binary black holes (BHs) merging in the distant Universe contains subtle insights into their formation scenarios. One of the puzzling properties of detected GW sources is…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2024-09-25 Aleksandra Olejak , Jakub Klencki , Xiao-Tian Xu , Chen Wang , Krzysztof Belczynski , Jean-Pierre Lasota

The rapidly expanding Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC) necessitates the development of model-independent techniques to uncover trends and subpopulations within the binary black hole (BBH) population. We present the first usage of…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-03-09 A. J. Amsellem , I. Magaña Hernandez , A. Palmese , J. Gassert