Dropping Anchor: Understanding the Populations of Binary Black Holes with Random and Aligned Spin Orientations

Abstract

The relative spin orientations of black holes (BHs) in binaries encode their evolutionary history: BHs assembled dynamically should have isotropically distributed spins, while spins of the BHs originating in the field should be aligned with the orbital angular momentum. In this article, we introduce a simple population model for these dynamical and field binaries that uses spin orientations as an anchor to disentangle these two evolutionary channels. We then analyze binary BH mergers in the Third Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC-3) and ask whether BHs from the isotropic-spin population possess different distributions of mass ratio, spin magnitudes, or redshifts from the preferentially-aligned-spin population. We find no compelling evidence that binary BHs in GWTC-3 have different source-property distributions depending on their spin alignment, but we do find that the dynamical and field channels cannot both have mass-ratio distributions that strongly favor equal masses. We give an example of how this can be used to provide insights into the various processes that drive these BHs to merge. We also find that the current detections are insufficient in extracting differences in spin magnitude or redshift distributions of isotropic and aligned spin populations.

15 pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal

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• Evidence for a correlation between binary black hole mass ratio and black-hole spins
• PixelPop: High Resolution Nonparameteric Inference of Gravitational-Wave Populations in Multiple Dimensions
• Binary vision: The merging black hole binary mass distribution via iterative density estimation
• Nonparametric analysis of correlations in the binary black hole population with LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA data
• Spin Doctors: How to diagnose a hierarchical merger origin
• Exploring field-evolution and dynamical-capture coalescing binary black holes in GWTC-3
• What's in a binary black hole's mass parameter?
• Structure and Skewness of the Effective Inspiral Spin Distribution of Binary Black Hole Mergers
• Seeking Spinning Subpopulations of Black Hole Binaries via Iterative Density Estimation
• Probing Spin-Orbit Resonances with the Binary Black Hole Population
• Evidence for Three Subpopulations of Merging Binary Black Holes at Different Primary Masses
• Inferring the spins of merging black holes in the presence of data-quality issues
• Population Synthesis of Gravitational Wave Sources
• Can Big Black Holes Merge with the Smallest Black Holes?
• Measuring spin precession from massive black hole binaries with gravitational waves: insights from time-domain signal morphology