No evidence that the majority of black holes in binaries have zero spin

Abstract

The spin properties of merging black holes observed with gravitational waves can offer novel information about the origin of these systems. The magnitude and orientations of black hole spins offer a record of binaries' evolutionary history, encoding information about massive stellar evolution and the astrophysical environments in which binary black holes are assembled. Recent analyses of the binary black hole population have yielded conflicting portraits of the black hole spin distribution. Some work suggests that black hole spins are small but non-zero and exhibit a wide range of misalignment angles relative to binaries' orbital angular momenta. Other work concludes that the majority of black holes are non-spinning while the remainder are rapidly rotating and primarily aligned with their orbits. We revisit these conflicting conclusions, employing a variety of complementary methods to measure the distribution of spin magnitudes and orientations among binary black hole mergers. We find that the existence of a sub-population of black hole with vanishing spins is not required by current data. Should such a sub-population exist, we conclude that it must contain $\lesssim 60\%$ of binaries. Additionally, we find evidence for significant spin-orbit misalignment among the binary black hole population, with some systems exhibiting misalignment angles greater than $90^{\circ }$, and see no evidence for an approximately spin-aligned sub-population.

arXiv commentMatches published version. v2 contains new appendix presenting predictive checks of population models

References in corpus (74)

• SciPy 1.0--Fundamental Algorithms for Scientific Computing in Python
• Array Programming with NumPy
• Astropy: A Community Python Package for Astronomy
• emcee: The MCMC Hammer
• The Astropy Project: Building an inclusive, open-science project and status of the v2.0 core package
• Advanced Virgo: a 2nd generation interferometric gravitational wave detector
• GWTC-1: A Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First and Second Observing Runs
• GW151226: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a 22-Solar-Mass Binary Black Hole Coalescence
• GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run
• dynesty: A Dynamic Nested Sampling Package for Estimating Bayesian Posteriors and Evidences
• GW190814: Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 23 M${}_{\odot }$ Black Hole with a 2.6 M${}_{\odot }$ Compact Object
• Characterization of the LIGO detectors during their sixth science run
• Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo
• GW190412: Observation of a Binary-Black-Hole Coalescence with Asymmetric Masses
• Computationally efficient models for the dominant and sub-dominant harmonic modes of precessing binary black holes
• Open data from the first and second observing runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo
• Surrogate models for precessing binary black hole simulations with unequal masses
• Extracting distribution parameters from multiple uncertain observations with selection biases
• Towards models of gravitational waveforms from generic binaries II: Modelling precession effects with a single effective precession parameter
• New binary black hole mergers in the second observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo
• Illuminating Black Hole Binary Formation Channels with Spins in Advanced LIGO
• Black Holes: The Next Generation -- Repeated Mergers in Dense Star Clusters and their Gravitational-Wave Properties
• Multipolar Effective-One-Body Waveforms for Precessing Binary Black Holes: Construction and Validation
• Are merging black holes born from stellar collapse or previous mergers?
• Analysis of spin precession in binary black hole systems including quadrupole-monopole interaction
• Most Black Holes are Born Very Slowly Rotating
• Distinguishing Spin-Aligned and Isotropic Black Hole Populations With Gravitational Waves
• The LIGO Open Science Center
• Does the Black Hole Merger Rate Evolve with Redshift?
• Hierarchical mergers of stellar-mass black holes and their gravitational-wave signatures
• The origin of spin in binary black holes: Predicting the distributions of the main observables of Advanced LIGO
• Measuring the binary black hole mass spectrum with an astrophysically motivated parameterization
• The spin of the second-born black hole in coalescing binary black holes
• Spin orientations of merging black holes formed from the evolution of stellar binaries
• Phenomenological model for the gravitational-wave signal from precessing binary black holes with two-spin effects
• Merging stellar-mass binary black holes
• Determining the population properties of spinning black holes
• Reconstructing phenomenological distributions of compact binaries via gravitational wave observations
• Use of gravitational waves to probe the formation channels of compact binaries
• Absorption of mass and angular momentum by a black hole: Time-domain formalisms for gravitational perturbations, and the small-hole/slow-motion approximation
• The impact of mass-transfer physics on the observable properties of field binary black hole populations
• Evidence for hierarchical black hole mergers in the second LIGO--Virgo gravitational-wave catalog
• Black Hole and Neutron Star Binary Mergers in Triple Systems: Merger Fraction and Spin-Orbit Misalignment
• Monte-Carlo simulations of black hole mergers in AGN disks: Low ${\chi }_{\mathrm{eff}}$ mergers and predictions for LIGO
• Using spin to understand the formation of LIGO's black holes
• Constraints on Binary Black Hole Populations from LIGO-Virgo Detections
• Black hole genealogy: Identifying hierarchical mergers with gravitational waves
• Research Note: The Expected Spins of Gravitational Wave Sources With Isolated Field Binary Progenitors
• Distribution of Effective Spins and Masses of Binary Black Holes from the LIGO and Virgo O1-O3a Observing Runs
• Black Hole Spin Evolution: Implications for Short-hard Gamma Ray Bursts and Gravitational Wave Detection
• The Low Effective Spin of Binary Black Holes and Implications for Individual Gravitational-Wave Events
• Explaining LIGO's observations via isolated binary evolution with natal kicks
• Black Hole Coagulation: Modeling Hierarchical Mergers in Black Hole Populations
• Inferring the properties of a population of compact binaries in presence of selection effects
• Building better spin models for merging binary black holes: Evidence for non-spinning and rapidly spinning nearly aligned sub-populations
• Tidal heating and torquing of a Kerr black hole to next-to-leading order in the tidal coupling
• Inferences about supernova physics from gravitational-wave measurements: GW151226 spin misalignment as an indicator of strong black-hole natal kicks
• A detailed analysis of GW190521 with phenomenological waveform models
• The implications of high BH spins on the origin of BH-BH mergers
• The spin rate of pre-collapse stellar cores: wave-driven angular momentum transport in massive stars
• A generalized precession parameter ${\chi }_{\mathrm{p}}$ to interpret gravitational-wave data
• Suspicious Siblings: The Distribution of Mass and Spin Across Component Black Holes in Isolated Binary Evolution
• Constraining black-hole spins with gravitational wave observations
• State of the field: Binary black hole natal kicks and prospects for isolated field formation after GWTC-2
• Detection and Parameter Estimation of Gravitational Waves from Compact Binary Inspirals with Analytical Double-Precessing Templates
• Pathways for producing binary black holes with large misaligned spins in the isolated formation channel
• Effective spin distribution of black hole mergers in triples
• New effective precession spin for modeling multimodal gravitational waveforms in the strong-field regime
• Understanding how fast black holes spin by analysing data from the second gravitational-wave catalogue
• Stable mass transfer can explain massive binary black hole mergers with a high spin component
• Evidence for subdominant multipole moments and precession in merging black-hole-binaries from GWTC-2.1
• Hints of spin-orbit resonances in the binary black hole population
• Biases in estimates of black hole kicks from the spin distribution of binary black holes
• Signs of Higher Multipoles and Orbital Precession in GW151226

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Cover Your Basis: Comprehensive Data-Driven Characterization of the Binary Black Hole Population
• The population properties of spinning black holes using Gravitational-wave Transient Catalog 3
• Potential Subpopulations and Assembling Tendency of the Merging Black Holes
• Spin it as you like: the (lack of a) measurement of the spin tilt distribution with LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA binary black holes
• Tossing Black Hole Spin Axes
• Dropping Anchor: Understanding the Populations of Binary Black Holes with Random and Aligned Spin Orientations
• Model exploration in gravitational-wave astronomy with the maximum population likelihood
• Merging Black Holes: Assessing the Performance of Two Analytic Gravitational Waves Models
• Which black hole formed first? Mass-ratio reversal in massive binary stars from gravitational-wave data