Compactness peaks: An astrophysical interpretation of the mass distribution of merging binary black holes

Abstract

With the growing number of detections of binary black hole mergers, we are beginning to probe structure in the distribution of masses. A recent study by Schneider et al. proposes that isolated binary evolution of stripped stars naturally gives rise to the peaks at chirp masses $\sim 8M_{\odot }$, $14M_{\odot }$ in the chirp mass distribution and explains the dearth of black holes between $\approx 10-12M_{\odot }$ in chirp mass. The gap in chirp mass results from an apparent gap in the component mass distribution between $m_1,m_2\approx 10-15M_{\odot }$ and the specific pairing of these black holes. This component mass gap results from the variation in core compactness of the progenitor, where a drop in compactness of Carbon-Oxygen core mass will no longer form black holes from core collapse. We develop a population model motivated by this scenario to probe the structure of the component mass distribution of binary black holes consisting of two populations: 1) two peak components to represent black holes formed in the compactness peaks, and 2) a powerlaw component to account for any polluting events, these are binaries that may have formed from different channels (e.g. dynamical). We perform hierarchical Bayesian inference to analyse the events from the third gravitational-wave transient catalogue (GWTC-3) with this model. We find that there is a preference for the lower mass peak to drop off sharply at $\sim 11M_{\odot }$ and the upper mass peak to turn on at $\sim 13M_{\odot }$, in line with predictions from Schneider et al. However, there is no clear evidence for a gap. We also find mild support for the two populations to have different spin distributions. In addition to these population results, we highlight observed events of interest that differ from the expected population distribution of compact objects formed from stripped stars.

11 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (28)

• Advanced Virgo: a 2nd generation interferometric gravitational wave detector
• GW170608: Observation of a 19-solar-mass Binary Black Hole Coalescence
• Towards models of gravitational waveforms from generic binaries II: Modelling precession effects with a single effective precession parameter
• Mind the gap: The location of the lower edge of the pair instability supernovae black hole mass gap
• Illuminating Black Hole Binary Formation Channels with Spins in Advanced LIGO
• Forecasting the detection capabilities of third-generation gravitational-wave detectors using $\text{GWFAST}$
• Compact object mergers: exploring uncertainties from stellar and binary evolution with SEVN
• Towards a Realistic Explosion Landscape for Binary Population Synthesis
• Dynamical Formation of Low-Mass Merging Black Hole Binaries like GW151226
• No peaks without valleys: The stable mass transfer channel for gravitational-wave sources in light of the neutron star-black hole mass gap
• Exploring Features in the Binary Black Hole Population
• Coalescing black hole binaries from globular clusters: mass distributions and comparison to gravitational wave data from GWTC-3
• Ain't No Mountain High Enough: Semi-Parametric Modeling of LIGO-Virgos Binary Black Hole Mass Distribution
• Resolving the Stellar-Collapse and Hierarchical-Merger origins of the Coalescing Black Holes
• Pulsational pair-instability supernovae: gravitational collapse, black-hole formation, and beyond
• Updated observing scenarios and multi-messenger implications for the International Gravitational-wave Network's O4 and O5
• Do unequal-mass binary black hole systems have larger ${\chi }_{\text{eff}}$? Probing correlations with copulas in gravitational-wave astronomy
• Compact Binary Coalescences: Astrophysical Processes and Lessons Learned
• Astrophysical implications of GW190412 as a remnant of a previous black-hole merger
• Flexible and Fast Estimation of Binary Merger Population Distributions with Adaptive KDE
• Bimodal black-hole mass distribution and chirp masses of binary black-hole mergers
• Binary vision: The merging black hole binary mass distribution via iterative density estimation
• Divergence in mass ratio distributions between low-mass and high-mass coalescing binary black holes
• Physical Models for the Astrophysical Population of Black Holes: Application to the Bump in the Mass Distribution of Gravitational Wave Sources
• Being Careful with the Field Formation Interpretation of GW190412
• Exploring field-evolution and dynamical-capture coalescing binary black holes in GWTC-3
• What's in a binary black hole's mass parameter?
• No evidence for a dip in the binary black hole mass spectrum

Cited by in corpus (7)

• It's written in the massive stars: The role of stellar physics in the formation of black holes
• Signatures of a subpopulation of hierarchical mergers in the GWTC-4 gravitational-wave dataset
• Seeking Spinning Subpopulations of Black Hole Binaries via Iterative Density Estimation
• Evidence for Three Subpopulations of Merging Binary Black Holes at Different Primary Masses
• On the Astrophysical Origin of Binary Black Hole Subpopulations: A Tale of Three Channels?
• Can Big Black Holes Merge with the Smallest Black Holes?
• Examining the Gap in the Chirp Mass Distribution of Binary Black Holes