Publications (43)
Probing the Black Hole Metric. I. Black Hole Shadows and Binary Black-Hole Inspirals
Dimitrios Psaltis, Colm Talbot, Ethan Payne +1
In General Relativity, the spacetimes of black holes have three fundamental properties: (i) they are the same, to lowest order in spin, as the metrics of stellar objects; (ii) they…
Mitigating the counterpart selection effect for standard sirens
Hsin-Yu Chen, Colm Talbot, Eve A. Chase
The disagreement in the Hubble constant measured by different cosmological probes highlights the need for a better understanding of the observations or new physics. The standard si…
Bilby-MCMC: An MCMC sampler for gravitational-wave inference
Gregory Ashton, Colm Talbot
We introduce Bilby-MCMC, a Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo sampling algorithm tuned for the analysis of gravitational waves from merging compact objects. Bilby-MCMC provides a parallel-te…
Rapid localization and inference on compact binary coalescences with the Advanced LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA gravitational-wave detector network
Soichiro Morisaki, Rory Smith, Leo Tsukada +4
We present a rapid parameter estimation framework for compact binary coalescence (CBC) signals observed by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) detector network. The goal of our framework is…
An introduction to Bayesian inference in gravitational-wave astronomy: parameter estimation, model selection, and hierarchical models
Eric Thrane, Colm Talbot
This is an introduction to Bayesian inference with a focus on hierarchical models and hyper-parameters. We write primarily for an audience of Bayesian novices, but we hope to provi…
Determining the population properties of spinning black holes
Colm Talbot, Eric Thrane
There are at least two formation scenarios consistent with the first gravitational-wave observations of binary black hole mergers. In field models, black hole binaries are formed f…
Progress toward the detection of the gravitational-wave background from stellar-mass binary black holes: a mock data challenge
Xiao-Xiao Kou, Muhammed Saleem, Vuk Mandic +2
While the third LIGO--Virgo gravitational-wave transient catalog includes 90 signals, it is believed that binary black holes merge somewhere in the Universe every…
Fast, flexible, and accurate evaluation of gravitational-wave Malmquist bias with machine learning
Colm Talbot, Eric Thrane
Many astronomical surveys are limited by the brightness of the sources, and gravitational-wave searches are no exception. The detectability of gravitational waves from merging bina…
Gravitational-wave astronomy with an uncertain noise power spectral density
Colm Talbot, Eric Thrane
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 propert…
Measuring the binary black hole mass spectrum with an astrophysically motivated parameterization
Colm Talbot, Eric Thrane
Gravitational-wave detections have revealed a previously unknown population of stellar mass black holes with masses above . These observations provide a new way to…
The orientations of the binary black holes in GWTC-3
Salvatore Vitale, Sylvia Biscoveanu, Colm Talbot
It is expected that the orbital planes of gravitational-wave (GW) sources are isotropically distributed. However, both physical and technical factors, such as alternate theories of…
Inference with finite time series: Observing the gravitational Universe through windows
Colm Talbot, Eric Thrane, Sylvia Biscoveanu +1
Time series analysis is ubiquitous in many fields of science including gravitational-wave astronomy, where strain time series are analyzed to infer the nature of gravitational-wave…
Measuring the rate of glitches in interferometric gravitational wave detectors with a hierarchical Bayesian model
Gregory Ashton, Colm Talbot, Andrew Lundgren +2
Ground-based gravitational wave detectors are now routinely surveying the dark Universe, finding hundreds of collisions between compact objects such as black holes and neutron star…
Spin it as you like: the (lack of a) measurement of the spin tilt distribution with LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA binary black holes
Salvatore Vitale, Sylvia Biscoveanu, Colm Talbot
While much has been learned about black holes by analyzing the latest LVK catalog, GWTC-3, a measurement of the astrophysical distribution of the black hole spin orientations remai…
Constraining the Gravitational-Wave Afterglow From a Binary Neutron Star Coalescence
Sharan Banagiri, Michael W. Coughlin, James Clark +5
Binary neutron star mergers are rich laboratories for physics, accessible with ground-based interferometric gravitational-wave detectors such as the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virg…
Measuring the neutron star equation of state with gravitational waves: the first forty binary neutron star mergers
Francisco Hernandez Vivanco, Rory Smith, Eric Thrane +3
Gravitational waves from binary neutron star coalescences contain rich information about matter at supranuclear densities encoded by the neutron star equation of state. We can meas…
Gravitational-wave inference in the catalog era: evolving priors and marginal events
Shanika Galaudage, Colm Talbot, Eric Thrane
As the number of gravitational-wave transient detections grows, the inclusion of marginally significant events in gravitational-wave catalogs will lead to increasing contamination…
Better early than never: A new test for superluminal gravitational wave polarizations
Kristen Schumacher, Colm Talbot, Daniel E. Holz +1
In some beyond-Einstein theories of gravity, gravitational waves can contain up to six polarizations, which are allowed to propagate at different speeds faster than light. These di…
Bilby: A user-friendly Bayesian inference library for gravitational-wave astronomy
Gregory Ashton, Moritz Huebner, Paul D. Lasky +18
Bayesian parameter estimation is fast becoming the language of gravitational-wave astronomy. It is the method by which gravitational-wave data is used to infer the sources' astroph…
Measuring the primordial gravitational-wave background in the presence of astrophysical foregrounds
Sylvia Biscoveanu, Colm Talbot, Eric Thrane +1
Primordial gravitational waves are expected to create a stochastic background encoding information about the early Universe that may not be accessible by other means. However, the…
Inferring the Astrophysical Population of Gravitational Wave Sources in the Presence of Noise Transients
Jack Heinzel, Colm Talbot, Gregory Ashton +1
The global network of interferometric gravitational wave (GW) observatories (LIGO, Virgo, KAGRA) has detected and characterized nearly 100 mergers of binary compact objects. Howeve…
Building better spin models for merging binary black holes: Evidence for non-spinning and rapidly spinning nearly aligned sub-populations
Shanika Galaudage, Colm Talbot, Tushar Nagar +3
Recent work paints a conflicting portrait of the distribution of black hole spins in merging binaries measured with gravitational waves. Some analyses find that a significant fract…
Evidence for hierarchical black hole mergers in the second LIGO--Virgo gravitational-wave catalog
Chase Kimball, Colm Talbot, Christopher P. L. Berry +10
We study the population properties of merging binary black holes in the second LIGO--Virgo Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog assuming they were all formed dynamically in gravita…
Inference with finite time series II: the window strikes back
Colm Talbot, Sylvia Biscoveanu, Aaron Zimmerman +9
Smooth window functions are often applied to strain data when inferring the parameters describing the astrophysical sources of gravitational-wave transients. Within the LIGO-Virgo-…
Growing Pains: Understanding the Impact of Likelihood Uncertainty on Hierarchical Bayesian Inference for Gravitational-Wave Astronomy
Colm Talbot, Jacob Golomb
Observations of gravitational waves emitted by merging compact binaries have provided tantalising hints about stellar astrophysics, cosmology, and fundamental physics. However, the…
Inferring the population properties of binary black holes from unresolved gravitational waves
Rory Smith, Colm Talbot, Francisco Hernandez Vivanco +1
The vast majority of compact binary mergers in the Universe produce gravitational waves that are too weak to yield unambiguous detections; they are unresolved. We present a method…
The effect of spin mismodeling on gravitational-wave measurements of the binary neutron star mass distribution
Sylvia Biscoveanu, Colm Talbot, Salvatore Vitale
The binary neutron star (BNS) mass distribution measured with gravitational-wave observations has the potential to reveal information about the dense matter equation of state, supe…
The Stochastic Siren: Astrophysical Gravitational-Wave Background Measurements of the Hubble Constant
Bryce Cousins, Kristen Schumacher, Adrian Ka-Wai Chung +4
We report the first measurement of the Hubble constant using the stochastic gravitational-wave background arising from binary black hole mergers. This astrophysical backgroun…
pygwb: Python-based library for gravitational-wave background searches
Arianna I. Renzini, Alba Romero-Rodrguez, Colm Talbot +31
The collection of gravitational waves (GWs) that are either too weak or too numerous to be individually resolved is commonly referred to as the gravitational-wave background (GWB).…
Hierarchical Inference of Binary Neutron Star Mass Distribution and Equation of State with Gravitational Waves
Jacob Golomb, Colm Talbot
Gravitational wave observations of binary neutron star mergers provide valuable information about neutron star structure and the equation of state of dense nuclear matter. Numerous…
Black hole genealogy: Identifying hierarchical mergers with gravitational waves
Chase Kimball, Colm Talbot, Christopher P. L. Berry +4
In dense stellar environments, the merger products of binary black hole mergers may undergo additional mergers. These hierarchical mergers are predicted to have higher masses than…
Searching for structure in the binary black hole spin distribution
Jacob Golomb, Colm Talbot
The spins of black holes in merging binaries can reveal information related to the formation and evolution of these systems through their gravitational wave emission. Combining eve…
Probing Extremal Gravitational-Wave Events with Coarse-Grained Likelihoods
Reed Essick, Amanda Farah, Shanika Galaudage +4
As catalogs of gravitational-wave transients grow, new records are set for the most extreme systems observed to date. The most massive observed black holes probe the physics of pai…
Gravitational-wave memory: waveforms and phenomenology
Colm Talbot, Eric Thrane, Paul D. Lasky +1
The non-linear gravitational-wave memory effect is a prediction of general relativity in which test masses are permanently displaced by gravitational radiation. We implement a meth…
Massively parallel Bayesian inference for transient gravitational-wave astronomy
Rory Smith, Gregory Ashton, Avi Vajpeyi +1
Understanding the properties of transient gravitational waves and their sources is of broad interest in physics and astronomy. Bayesian inference is the standard framework for astr…
Gravitational-wave astronomy with a physical calibration model
Ethan Payne, Colm Talbot, Paul D. Lasky +2
We carry out astrophysical inference for compact binary merger events in LIGO-Virgo's first gravitational-wave transient catalog (GWTC-1) using a physically motivated calibration m…
Parallelized Inference for Gravitational-Wave Astronomy
Colm Talbot, Rory Smith, Eric Thrane +1
Bayesian inference is the workhorse of gravitational-wave astronomy, for example, determining the mass and spins of merging black holes, revealing the neutron star equation of stat…
Accelerated parameter estimation in Bilby with relative binning
Kruthi Krishna, Aditya Vijaykumar, Apratim Ganguly +5
We describe an implementation of the relative binning technique to speed up parameter estimation of gravitational-wave signals. We first give a pedagogical overview of relative bin…
Thanks for the memory: measuring gravitational-wave memory in the first LIGO/Virgo gravitational-wave transient catalog
Moritz Hübner, Colm Talbot, Paul D. Lasky +1
Gravitational-wave memory, a strong-field effect of general relativity, manifests itself as a permanent displacement in spacetime. We develop a Bayesian framework to detect gravita…
Too small to fail: characterizing sub-solar mass black hole mergers with gravitational waves
Noah E. Wolfe, Salvatore Vitale, Colm Talbot
The detection of a sub-solar mass black hole could yield dramatic new insights into the nature of dark matter and early-Universe physics, as such objects lack a traditional astroph…
Accelerating Tests of General Relativity with Gravitational-Wave Signals using Hybrid Sampling
Noah E. Wolfe, Colm Talbot, Jacob Golomb
The Advanced LIGO/Virgo interferometers have observed gravitational-wave transients enabling new questions to be answered about relativity, astrophysics, and cosmology.…
GWPopulation: Hardware agnostic population inference for compact binaries and beyond
Colm Talbot, Amanda Farah, Shanika Galaudage +2
Since the first direct detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO--Virgo collaboration in 2015, the size of the gravitational-wave transient catalog has grown to nearly 100 event…
Higher order gravitational-wave modes with likelihood reweighting
Ethan Payne, Colm Talbot, Eric Thrane
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 e…