Related papers: Can GW231123 have a stellar origin?
The Milky Way is believed to host hundreds of millions of quiescent stellar-mass black holes (BHs). In the last decade, some of these objects have been potentially uncovered via gravitational microlensing events. All these detections…
We demonstrate the power of the black hole mass gap as a novel probe of fundamental physics. New light particles that couple to the Standard Model can act as an additional source of energy loss in the cores of population-III stars,…
Very recently a compact object with a mass in the range $2.50\div 2.67\, M_{\odot}$ has been discovered via gravitational waves detection of a compact binary coalescence. The mass of this object makes it among the heaviest neutron star…
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) is one of a new generation of detectors of gravitational radiation. The existence of gravitational radiation was first predicted by Einstein in 1916, however gravitational waves…
The LIGO detection of the gravitational wave transient GW150914, from the inspiral and merger of two black holes with masses $\gtrsim 30\, \text{M}_\odot$, suggests a population of binary black holes with relatively high mass. This…
We present a search for gravitational waves from the coalescence of sub-solar mass black hole binaries using data from the first half of Advanced LIGO and Virgo's third observing run. The observation of a sub-solar mass black hole merger…
Understanding the formation and evolution of the stellar-mass binary black holes discovered by LIGO and Virgo is a challenge that spans many areas of astrophysics, from stellar evolution, dynamics and accretion disks, to possible exotic…
Stellar theory predicts a forbidden range of black-hole masses between ${\sim}50$--$130\,M_\odot$ due to pair-instability supernovae, but evidence for such a gap in the mass distribution from gravitational-wave astronomy has proved elusive.…
We evaluate the mass of the black holes of GW150914 at their event horizons via quasi-local energy approach and obtain the values of 71 and 57 solar masses, compared to their asymptotic values of 36 and 29 units, respectively, as reported…
Ultralight bosonic fields are compelling dark-matter candidates and arise in a variety of beyond-Standard-Model scenarios. These fields can tap energy and angular momentum from spinning black holes through superradiant instabilities, during…
Primordial density perturbations in the radiation-dominated era of the early Universe are expected to generate stochastic gravitational waves (GWs) due to nonlinear mode coupling. In this \emph{Letter}, we report on a search for such a…
The detection of the gravitational wave event GW230529, presumably a neutron star-black hole (NSBH) merger, by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration marks an exciting discovery for multimessenger astronomy. The black hole (BH) has a high…
GW190521 was the most massive black hole merger discovered by LIGO/Virgo so far, with masses in tension with stellar evolution models. A possible explanation of such heavy black holes is that they themselves are the remnants of previous…
We address two important questions in gravitational-wave astronomy. What is the astrophysical formation scenario leading to black-hole binary mergers? Did some of the merging black holes form hierarchically through previous generations of…
If binaries consisting of two 100 Msun black holes exist they would serve as extraordinarily powerful gravitational-wave sources, detectable to redshifts of z=2 with the advanced LIGO/Virgo ground-based detectors. Large uncertainties about…
Gravitational-wave observation together with a large number of electromagnetic observations shows that the source of the latest gravitational-wave event, GW170817, detected primarily by advanced LIGO, is the merger of a binary neutron star.…
Gravitational-wave (GW) detections of merging neutron star-black hole (NSBH) systems probe astrophysical neutron star (NS) and black hole (BH) mass distributions, especially at the transition between NS and BH masses. Of particular interest…
The high rate of black hole (BH) mergers detected by LIGO/Virgo opened questions on their astrophysical origin. One possibility is the dynamical channel, in which binary formation and hardening is catalyzed by dynamical encounters in…
We map the likelihood of GW190521, the heaviest detected binary black hole (BBH) merger, by sampling under different mass and spin priors designed to be uninformative. We find that a source-frame total mass of $\sim$$150 M_{\odot}$ is…
Population inference of gravitational-wave catalogues is a useful tool to translate observations of black-hole mergers into constraints on compact-binary formation. Different formation channels predict identifiable signatures in the…