A Highly Spinning and Aligned Binary Black Hole Merger in the Advanced LIGO First Observing Run

Abstract

We report a new binary black hole merger in the publicly available LIGO First Observing Run (O1) data release. The event has an inverse false alarm rate of one per six years in the detector-frame chirp-mass range ${\mathcal{M}}^{\det }\in [20,40]M_{\odot }$ in a new independent analysis pipeline that we developed. Our best estimate of the probability that the event is of astrophysical origin is $P_{\mathrm{astro}}\sim 0.71.$ The estimated physical parameters of the event indicate that it is the merger of two massive black holes, ${\mathcal{M}}^{\det }=31_{-3}^{+2}{M}_{\odot }$ with an effective spin parameter, ${\chi }_{\mathrm{eff}}=0.81_{-0.21}^{+0.15}$, making this the most highly spinning merger reported to date. It is also among the two highest redshift mergers observed so far. The high aligned spin of the merger supports the hypothesis that merging binary black holes can be created by binary stellar evolution.

Comments are welcome. To be submitted to a journal soon

References in corpus (17)

• Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter
• An improved effective-one-body model of spinning, nonprecessing binary black holes for the era of gravitational-wave astrophysics with advanced detectors
• The merger rate of primordial-black-hole binaries
• Towards models of gravitational waveforms from generic binaries II: Modelling precession effects with a single effective precession parameter
• MOCCA-SURVEY Database I: Coalescing Binary Black Holes Originating From Globular Clusters
• Merging black hole binaries: the effects of progenitor's metallicity, mass-loss rate and Eddington factor
• The LIGO Open Science Center
• Dynamics of stellar black holes in young star clusters with different metallicities - II. Black hole-black hole binaries
• The cosmic merger rate of stellar black hole binaries from the Illustris simulation
• Stellar-mass black holes in young massive and open stellar clusters and their role in gravitational-wave generation
• The Total Merger Rate of Compact Object Binaries In The Local Universe
• Solving puzzles of GW150914 by primordial black holes
• The Formation and Gravitational-Wave Detection of Massive Stellar Black-Hole Binaries
• Ultra-luminous X-ray sources and neutron-star-black-hole mergers from very massive close binaries at low metallicity
• Dynamical Formation of Low-Mass Merging Black Hole Binaries like GW151226
• Hierarchical black hole triples in young star clusters: impact of Kozai-Lidov resonance on mergers
• A Study of the Evolution of the Close Binaries Cyg X-3, IC 10 X-1, NGC 300 X-1, SS 433, and M33 X-7 Using the "Scenario Machine"

Cited by in corpus (14)

• GW190814: Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 23 M${}_{\odot }$ Black Hole with a 2.6 M${}_{\odot }$ Compact Object
• Multipolar Effective-One-Body Waveforms for Precessing Binary Black Holes: Construction and Validation
• Primordial Black Holes Confront LIGO/Virgo data: Current situation
• Mass-gap Mergers in Active Galactic Nuclei
• Validating the Effective-One-Body Numerical-Relativity Waveform Models for Spin-aligned Binary Black Holes along Eccentric Orbits
• You Can't Always Get What You Want: The Impact of Prior Assumptions on Interpreting GW190412
• A brief overview of black hole-neutron star mergers
• A New Spin on an Old Black Hole: NuSTAR Spectroscopy of EXO 1846-031
• Effective spin distribution of black hole mergers in triples
• Horizons in a binary black hole merger I: Geometry and area increase
• Being Careful with the Field Formation Interpretation of GW190412
• The astrophysical odds of GW151216
• Repeated Ringing of the Black Hole's Bell: Quasi-Normal Bursts from Highly Eccentric, Extreme Mass-Ratio Binaries
• Convective Differential Rotation in Stars and Planets II: Observational and Numerical Tests