Black Hole Gravitational Potential Enhanced Fallback Accretion onto the Nascent Lighter Compact Object: Tentative Evidence in the O3 Run Data of LIGO/Virgo

Abstract

In a binary system, the gravitational potential of the primary black hole may play an important role in enhancing the fallback accretion onto the lighter compact object newly formed in the second supernova explosion. As a result, the final masses of the binary compact objects would be correlated, as suggested recently by Safarzadeh \& Wysocki. In this work, we analyze the mass distribution of four gravitational-wave events, which are characterized by both a small mass ratio and a low mass ($\le 5M_{\odot }$) of the light component, and find tentative evidence for a mass correlation among the objects. To evaluate the feasibility of testing such a hypothesis with upcoming observations, we carry out simulations with a mock population and perform Bayesian hierarchical inference for the mass distribution. We find that with dozens of low mass ratio events, whether there exists correlation in the component mass distributions or not can be robustly tested and the correlation, if it exists, can be well determined.

8 pages, 3 figures, ApJ published

References in corpus (12)

• GW190814: Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 23 M${}_{\odot }$ Black Hole with a 2.6 M${}_{\odot }$ Compact Object
• Observation of gravitational waves from two neutron star-black hole coalescences
• Use and Abuse of the Fisher Information Matrix in the Assessment of Gravitational-Wave Parameter-Estimation Prospects
• Where are LIGO's Big Black Holes?
• Gravitational waves from BH-NS binaries: Effective Fisher matrices and parameter estimation using higher harmonics
• Is GW190425 consistent with being a neutron star$-$black hole merger?
• Find the Gap: Black Hole Population Analysis with an Astrophysically Motivated Mass Function
• Poking Holes: Looking for Gaps in LIGO/Virgo's Black Hole Population
• A flexible Gaussian process reconstruction method and the mass function of the coalescing binary black hole systems
• Black Hole Mass Function of Coalescing Binary Black Hole Systems: Is There a Pulsational Pair Instability Mass Cutoff?
• A Common Origin for Low Mass Ratio Events Observed by LIGO and Virgo in the First Half of the Third Observing Run
• GW170817 and GW190814: tension on the maximum mass

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Resolving the Stellar-Collapse and Hierarchical-Merger origins of the Coalescing Black Holes
• Population properties and multimessenger prospects of neutron star-black hole mergers following GWTC-3
• Divergence in mass ratio distributions between low-mass and high-mass coalescing binary black holes
• Exploring field-evolution and dynamical-capture coalescing binary black holes in GWTC-3
• Population properties of neutron stars in the coalescing compact binaries