Related papers: GW231123: extreme spins or microglitches?
"Blip glitches" are a type of short duration transient noise in LIGO data. The cause for the majority of these is currently unknown. Short duration transient noise creates challenges for searches of the highest mass binary black hole…
When binary black holes form in the field, it is expected that their orbits typically circularize before coalescence. In galactic nuclei and globular clusters, binary black holes can form dynamically. Recent results suggest that…
Gravitational-wave observatories become more sensitive with each observing run, increasing the number of detected gravitational-wave signals. A limiting factor in identifying these signals is the presence of transient non-Gaussian noise,…
Most gravitational wave (GW) events observed by the LIGO and Virgo detectors are consistent with mergers of binary black holes (BBHs) on quasi-circular orbits. However, some events are also consistent with non-zero orbital eccentricity,…
The evolution of the spin and tilt of black holes in compact black hole - neutron star and black hole - black hole binary systems is investigated within the framework of the coalescing compact star binary model for short gamma ray bursts…
We provide a comprehensive analysis of GW190711_030756 and GW200114_020818, two of the most significant binary black hole merger candidates in the IAS catalog, with probabilities of astrophysical origin $p_{\rm astro}=0.99$ and $0.71$,…
Astrophysical black holes could be nearly extremal (that is, rotating nearly as fast as possible); therefore, nearly extremal black holes could be among the binaries that current and future gravitational-wave observatories will detect.…
We characterize the expected statistical errors with which the parameters of black-hole binaries can be measured from gravitational-wave (GW) observations of their inspiral, merger and ringdown by a network of second-generation ground-based…
The LIGO-Virgo collaboration recently reported the properties of GW190412, a binary black hole merger with unequal component masses (mass ratio $0.25^{+0.06}_{-0.04}$ when using the EOBNR PHM approximant) and a non-vanishing effective spin…
In fall of 2015, the two LIGO detectors measured the gravitational wave signal GW150914, which originated from a pair of merging black holes. In the final 0.2 seconds (about 8 gravitational-wave cycles) before the amplitude reached its…
GW230814 was detected by the LIGO Livingston observatory with a signal-to-noise ratio of 42.4 making it the loudest gravitational-wave signal in the GWTC-4.0 catalog. The source is consistent with a binary black hole coalescence similar to…
Spin precession in merging black-hole binaries is a treasure trove for both astrophysics and fundamental physics. There are now well-established strategies to infer from gravitational-wave data whether at least one of the two black holes is…
The two binary black-hole (BBH) coalescences detected by LIGO, GW150914 and GW151226, were relatively nearby sources, with a redshift of ~0.1. As the sensitivity of Advanced LIGO and Virgo increases in the next few years, they will…
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…
The unusual properties of GW231123, including component masses within the pair-instability mass gap ($137^{+22}_{-17}\mathrm{M}_\odot$ and $103^{+20}_{-52}\mathrm{M}_\odot$ at 90\% credible intervals) and extremely large spins near the Kerr…
To date, close to fifty presumed black hole binary mergers were observed by the LIGO and Virgo detectors. The analyses have been done with an assumption that these objects are black holes by limiting the spin prior to the Kerr bound.…
Robustly measuring binary black hole spins via gravitational waves is key to understanding these systems' astrophysical origins, but remains challenging -- especially for high-mass systems, whose signals are short and dominated by the…
We explore the possibility that GW190412, a binary black hole merger with a non-equal-mass ratio and significantly spinning primary, was formed through repeated black hole mergers in a dense super star cluster. Using a combination of…
The first direct detections of gravitational waves from merging binary black holes open a unique window into the binary black hole formation environment. One promising environmental signature is the angular distribution of the black hole…
One of the puzzles in the recent observations of gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers is the observed low (projected) spins of the progenitor black holes. In two of the four events, GW150914, and the recent GW170104, the…