A follow-up on intermediate-mass black hole candidates in the second LIGO-Virgo observing run with the Bayes Coherence Ratio

Abstract

The detection of an intermediate-mass black hole population ($10^2-10^6$ $M_{\odot }$) will provide clues to their formation environments (e.g., disks of active galactic nuclei, globular clusters) and illuminate a potential pathway to produce supermassive black holes. Ground-based gravitational-wave detectors are sensitive to mergers that can form intermediate-mass black holes weighing up to $\sim 450M_{\odot }$. However, ground-based detector data contain numerous incoherent short duration noise transients that can mimic the gravitational-wave signals from merging intermediate-mass black holes, limiting the sensitivity of searches. Here we follow-up on binary black hole merger candidates using a ranking statistic that measures the coherence or incoherence of triggers in multiple-detector data. We use this statistic to rank candidate events, initially identified by all-sky search pipelines, with lab-frame total masses $>55M_{\odot }$ using data from LIGO's second observing run. Our analysis does not yield evidence for new intermediate-mass black holes. However, we find support for eight stellar-mass binary black holes not reported in the first LIGO-Virgo gravitational wave transient catalog GWTC-1, seven of which have been previously reported by other catalogs.

10 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (32)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole
• Advanced Virgo: a 2nd generation interferometric gravitational wave detector
• Advanced LIGO
• GW190521: A Binary Black Hole Merger with a Total Mass of $150M_{\odot }$
• Robust parameter estimation for compact binaries with ground-based gravitational-wave observations using the LALInference software library
• Gravitational-wave sensitivity curves
• Intermediate and Extreme Mass-Ratio Inspirals -- Astrophysics, Science Applications and Detection using LISA
• Discovery of a 0.42-s pulsar in the ultraluminous X-ray source NGC 7793 P13
• Multipolar Effective-One-Body Waveforms for Precessing Binary Black Holes: Construction and Validation
• One Channel to Rule Them All? Constraining the Origins of Binary Black Holes using Multiple Formation Pathways
• Observational evidence for intermediate-mass black holes
• Implementing a search for aligned-spin neutron star -- black hole systems with advanced ground based gravitational wave detectors
• The Pair-Instability Mass Gap for Black Holes
• Intermediate mass black holes in AGN disks II. Model predictions & observational constraints
• AGN Disks Harden the Mass Distribution of Stellar-mass Binary Black Hole Mergers
• Black hole masses of tidal disruption event host galaxies
• Hierarchical black hole mergers in young, globular and nuclear star clusters: the effect of metallicity, spin and cluster properties
• Mass-gap Mergers in Active Galactic Nuclei
• Binary black hole mergers in AGN accretion discs: gravitational wave rate density estimates
• Search for intermediate mass black hole binaries in the third observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo
• Evidence for an intermediate-mass black hole from a gravitationally lensed gamma-ray burst
• Long-term observations of the pulsars in 47 Tucanae. I. A study of four elusive binary systems
• Black Hole Mergers from Star Clusters with Top-Heavy Initial Mass Functions
• Sensitivity functions for space-borne gravitational wave detectors
• Stellar-mass black holes in young massive and open stellar clusters V: comparisons with LIGO-Virgo merger rate densities
• Evolution of binary black holes in AGN accretion discs: Disc-binary interaction and gravitational wave emission
• An optimized PyCBC search for gravitational waves from intermediate-mass black hole mergers
• Gravitational wave detection without boot straps: a Bayesian approach
• From hydrodynamics to N-body simulations of star clusters: mergers and rotation
• The astrophysical odds of GW151216
• Gravitational-wave astronomy with an uncertain noise power spectral density

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Inferring the Astrophysical Population of Gravitational Wave Sources in the Presence of Noise Transients
• Identification of Intermediate-mass Black Hole Candidates Among a Sample of Sd Galaxies
• Searching for gravitational waves from compact binary mergers powering long gamma-ray bursts during LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA's O3 run