Discriminating same-mass Neutron Stars and Black Holes gravitational wave-forms

Abstract

Gravitational wave-forms from coalescences of binary black hole systems and binary neutron star systems with low tidal effects can hardly be distinguished if the two systems have similar masses. In the absence of discriminating power based on the gravitational wave-forms, the classification of sources into binary neutron stars, binary black holes and mixed systems containing a black hole and a neutron star can only be unambiguous when assuming the standard model of stellar evolution and using the fact that there exists a mass gap between neutron stars and black holes. This approach is however limited by its own assumptions: for instance the 2.6 solar mass object detected in the GW190814 event remains unclassified, and models of new physics can introduce new compact objects, like primordial black holes, which may have masses in the same range as neutron stars. Then, without an electromagnetic counterpart (kilonova), classifying mergers of compact objects without mass gap criteria remains a difficult task, unless the source is close enough. In what follows we investigate a procedure to discriminate a model between binary neutron star merger and primordial binary black hole merger by using a Bayes factor in simulated wave-forms that we superimpose to realistic detector noise.

18 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Advanced Virgo: a 2nd generation interferometric gravitational wave detector
• Advanced LIGO
• GW190814: Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 23 M${}_{\odot }$ Black Hole with a 2.6 M${}_{\odot }$ Compact Object
• Tidal Love numbers of neutron stars
• Constraining neutron star tidal Love numbers with gravitational wave detectors
• Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: Recent Developments
• Model Waveform Accuracy Standards for Gravitational Wave Data Analysis
• The Landscape of the Neutrino Mechanism of Core-Collapse Supernovae: Neutron Star and Black Hole Mass Functions, Explosion Energies and Nickel Yields
• A template bank to search for gravitational waves from inspiralling compact binaries I: physical models

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Nuclear physics with gravitational waves from neutron stars disrupted by black holes
• On exotic objects made of dark energy and dark matter: Mass-to-radius profiles and tidal Love numbers
• Inferring jet physics from neutron star - black hole mergers with gravitational waves