Evidence of large recoil velocity from a black hole merger signal

Abstract

The final black hole left behind after a binary black hole merger can attain a recoil velocity, or a "kick", reaching values up to 5000 km/s. This phenomenon has important implications for gravitational wave astronomy, black hole formation scenarios, testing general relativity, and galaxy evolution. We consider the gravitational wave signal from the binary black hole merger GW200129_065458 (henceforth referred to as GW200129), which has been shown to exhibit strong evidence of orbital precession. Using numerical relativity surrogate models, we constrain the kick velocity of GW200129 to $v_f\sim 1542_{-1098}^{+747}$ km/s or $v_f\gtrsim 698$ km/s (one-sided limit), at 90\% credibility. This marks the first identification of a large kick velocity for an individual gravitational wave event. Given the kick velocity of GW200129, we estimate that there is a less than $0.48\%$ ($7.7\%$) probability that the remnant black hole after the merger would be retained by globular (nuclear star) clusters. Finally, we show that kick effects are not expected to cause biases in ringdown tests of general relativity for this event, although this may change in the future with improved detectors.

5 pages. Visualizations available at https://vijayvarma392.github.io/GW200129. Matches published version

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• Gravitational-wave parameter inference with the Newman-Penrose scalar ${\psi }_4$
• Constraining black-hole binary spin precession and nutation with sequential prior conditioning
• Comparing hierarchical black hole mergers in star clusters and active galactic nuclei
• A fully precessing higher-mode surrogate model of effective-one-body waveforms
• Distinguishing binary black hole precessional morphologies with gravitational wave observations
• A complete measurement of a black-hole recoil through higher-order gravitational-wave modes
• Hierarchical Merger of Primordial Black Holes in Dwarf Galaxies