中文

黑洩自转真的接近于零吗?

广义相对论与量子宇宙学 2026-02-16 v1

摘要

The fourth gravitational-wave transient catalog, GWTC-4.0, reports 153 binary black hole mergers with false-alarm rates <1,yr1<1,\mathrm{yr}^{-1}. Chirp masses are typically measured well, with the smallest fractional uncertainty being 22% at the 9090% credible level. Spins, on the other hand, are poorly constrained: the median of the best-measured spin component of the population, the effective spin, is χeff=0.04\chi_{\rm eff}=0.04, with a typical 9090% credible uncertainty of Δχeff=0.44\Delta\chi_{\rm eff}=0.44. The large majority -- 9090% of the observed black holes -- are consistent with spin magnitudes χ<0.57\chi<0.57 and are weakly aligned with the orbits. At 9090% credibility, the peaks of the inferred posteriors for spin magnitude are found to lie in the range 0.010.01--0.230.23. We show that this ``near-zero spins'' conclusion may be prior-driven, and that uniform-in-magnitude spin priors lead to under-exploration of the moderate-to-high spin region of parameter space. Adopting a physically agnostic prior that is uniform in spin-vector configuration space (i.e., spin states uniform within a unit sphere) yields similar constraints on χeff\chi_{\rm eff}, but substantially different spin-magnitude inferences than GWTC-4.0. The resulting shift in spins directly impacts tests of general relativity, constraints on near-extremal Kerr remnants, and astrophysical conclusions, including diagnostics of formation channels and hierarchical growth. In short, the data do not require vanishing spins -- the prior does, and accounting for this is essential for robust GR tests and population inferences.

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引用

@article{arxiv.2602.12859,
  title  = {Are black hole spins truly near-zero?},
  author = {Vaishak Prasad and B. S. Sathyaprakash},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.12859},
  year   = {2026}
}

备注

12 pages, 9 Figures