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LIGO and Virgo have recently observed a number of gravitational wave (GW) signals that are fully consistent with being emitted by binary black holes described by general relativity. However, there are theoretical proposals of exotic objects…
Gravitational-wave (GW) astrophysics is a field in full blossom. Since the landmark detection of GWs from a binary black hole on September 14th 2015, several compact-object binaries have been reported by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration. Such…
Gravitational waves deliver information in exquisite detail about astrophysical phenomena, among them the collision of two black holes, a system completely invisible to the eyes of electromagnetic telescopes. Models that predict…
The first discovery of the gravitational wave (GW) event, GW150914, suggests a higher merger rate of black-hole (BH) binaries. If this is true, a number of BH binaries will be observed via the second-generation GW detectors, and the…
In order to extract information about the properties of compact binaries, we must estimate the noise power spectral density of gravitational-wave data, which depends on the properties of the gravitational-wave detector. In practice, it is…
The two recent gravitational-wave events GW190425 and GW190814 from the third observing run of LIGO/Virgo have both a companion which is unexpected if originated from a neutron star or a stellar black hole, with masses $[1.6-2.5]~M_\odot$…
Adopting a binned method, we model-independently reconstruct the mass function of primordial black holes (PBHs) from GWTC-3 and find that such a PBH mass function can be explained by a broad red-tilted power spectrum of curvature…
For a brief moment, a binary black hole (BBH) merger can be the most powerful astrophysical event in the visible universe. Here we present a model fit for this gravitational-wave peak luminosity of nonprecessing quasicircular BBH systems as…
The high-mass ($M \gtrsim 30 M_\odot$) black holes (BHs) from the gravitational-wave (GW) observations of LIGO and Virgo came as a surprise to many astronomers. While the collapse of metal-poor massive stars could produce such BHs,…
Binary black hole (BBH) mergers,, an important source of gravitational-waves(GWs), are assumed to be hosted in galaxies. The probability of a galaxy to host a BBH is related to its properties, for example stellar mass and star formation…
Gravitational-wave astronomy provides a promising avenue for the discovery of new physics beyond general relativity as it probes extreme curvature and ultra-relativistic dynamics. However, in the absence of a compelling alternative to…
One fundamental goal of the newly born gravitational wave astronomy is discovering the origin of the observed binary black hole mergers. Towards this end, identifying features in the growing wealth of data may help in distinguishing…
The spectacular detection of gravitational waves (GWs) from GW 150914 and its reported association with a gamma-ray burst (GRB) offer new insights into the evolution of massive stars. Here it is shown that no single star of any mass and…
The properties of precessing, coalescing binary black holes are presently inferred through comparison with two approximate models of compact binary coalescence. In this work we show these two models often disagree substantially when…
Gravitational waves provide a window to probe general relativity (GR) under extreme conditions. The recent observations of GW190412 and GW190814 are unique high-mass-ratio mergers that enable the observation of gravitational-wave harmonics…
Gravitational wave models are used to infer the properties of black holes in merging binaries from the observed gravitational wave signals through Bayesian inference. Although we have access to a large collection of signal models that are…
The gravitational waveform of a merging stellar-mass binary is described at leading order by a quadrupolar mode. However, the complete waveform includes higher-order modes, which encode valuable information not accessible from the…
While recent detections of gravitational waves from the mergers of binary black holes match well with the predictions of General Relativity (GR), they cannot directly confirm the existence of event horizons. Exotic compact objects (ECOs)…
High-frequency quasiperiodic oscillations of the X-ray flux comming from black-hole binaries have the potential to provide precise estimates of the mass and the spin of the central black hole, if an adequate model for them was available.…
We search for features in the mass distribution of detected compact binary coalescences which signify the transition between neutron stars and black holes. We analyze all gravitational wave detections by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA made through the…