Gravitational waves carry information beyond effective spin parameters but it is hard to extract

Abstract

Gravitational wave observations of binary black hole mergers probe their astrophysical origins via the binary spin, namely the spin magnitudes and directions of each component black hole, together described by six degrees of freedom. However, the emitted signals primarily depend on two effective spin parameters that condense the spin degrees of freedom to those parallel and those perpendicular to the orbital plane. Given this reduction in dimensionality between the physically relevant problem and what is typically measurable, we revisit the question of whether information about the component spin magnitudes and directions can successfully be recovered via gravitational-wave observations, or if we simply extrapolate information about the distributions of effective spin parameters. To this end, we simulate three astrophysical populations with the same underlying effective-spin distribution but different spin magnitude and tilt distributions, on which we conduct full individual-event and population-level parameter estimation. We find that parameterized population models can indeed qualitatively distinguish between populations with different spin magnitude and tilt distributions at current sensitivity. However, it remains challenging to either accurately recover the true distribution or to diagnose biases due to model misspecification. We attribute the former to practical challenges of dealing with high-dimensional posterior distributions, and the latter to the fact that each individual event carries very little information about the full six spin degrees of freedom.

29 pages including appendices and references, 16 figures

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• Sampling the full hierarchical population posterior distribution in gravitational-wave astronomy
• Evidence of the pair instability gap from black hole masses
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• Gravitational-wave Observations Suggest Most Black Hole Mergers Form in Triples
• Reexamining Evidence of a Pair-Instability Mass Gap in the Binary Black Hole Population
• Do both black holes spin in merging binaries? Evidence from GWTC-4 and astrophysical implications
• Signatures of a subpopulation of hierarchical mergers in the GWTC-4 gravitational-wave dataset
• Reconstructing parametric gravitational-wave population fits from non-parametric results without refitting the data
• The NANOGrav 15 yr data set: Posterior predictive checks for gravitational-wave detection with pulsar timing arrays
• Mapping Parameter Correlations in Spinning Binary Black Hole Mergers
• Probing Spin-Orbit Resonances with the Binary Black Hole Population
• On the Astrophysical Origin of Binary Black Hole Subpopulations: A Tale of Three Channels?
• Analysis and simulations of binary black hole merger spins -- the question of spin-axis tossing at black hole formation
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