Mass Ratio of Binary Black Holes Determined from LIGO/Virgo Data Restricted to Small False Alarm Rate

Abstract

We focus on gravitational-wave events of binary black-hole mergers up to the third observing run with the minimum false alarm rate smaller than $10^{-5}{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$. These events tell us that the mass ratio of two black holes follows $m_2/m_1=0.723$ with the chance probability of 0.00301% for the chirp mass $M_{\mathrm{chirp}}>18M_{\odot }$. We show that the relation of $m_2/m_1=0.723$ is consistent with the binaries originated from population III stars which are the first stars in the universe. On the other hand, it is found for $\mathrm{chirp}<18M_{\odot }$ that the mass ratio follows $m_2/m_1=0.601$ with the chance probability of 0.117% if we ignore GW190412 with $m_2/m_1\sim 0.32$. This suggests a different origin from that for $M_{\mathrm{chirp}}>18M_{\odot }$.

Comment welcome. accepted by MNRAS