4 papers
How Common Are Common Envelopes? Quantifying Their Role in Forming Gravitational-Wave Sources
Floor S. Broekgaarden, Ana Lam, Sasha Levina +14
A central goal of gravitational-wave astronomy is to use merging binary black hole (BBH), black hole-neutron star (BHNS), and binary neutron star (BNS) systems as fossils to recons…
Massquerade: Impacts of Mass Ratio Reversals on Binary Black Hole Merger Rates and Mass Distributions
Tyler B. Smith, Floor Broekgaarden, Sasha Levina +4
We investigate the role of mass ratio reversal (MRR), in which the initially less massive star in a binary forms the more massive compact object, in shaping the astrophysical binar…
Photon-Count Statistics of Crab X-ray Pulses: Skellam Behavior and Excess Variance in the Main Pulse
Max Worchel, Margaret M. Ferris, Sasha Levina +15
The Crab pulsar (PSR B0531+21) provides an unusually rich test bed for statistical studies of high-energy photon-counting data, owing to its extreme brightness and the contrasting…
From cosmological simulations to binary black hole mergers: The impact of using analytical star formation history models on gravitational-wave source populations
Sasha Levina, Floor Broekgaarden, Lieke van Son +4
Observations of binary black hole (BBH) mergers provide a unique window into the lives of massive stars across cosmic time. Connecting redshift-dependent merger properties to massi…