Abstract
Gravitational waves (GWs) from binary black hole (BBH) mergers provide a new probe of massive-star evolution and the formation channels of binary compact objects. By coupling the growing sample of BBH systems with population synthesis models, we can begin to constrain the parameters of such models and glean unprecedented knowledge about the inherent physical processes that underpin binary stellar evolution. In this study, we apply a hierarchical Bayesian model to mass measurements from a synthetic GW sample to constrain the physical prescriptions in population models and the relative fraction of systems generated from various channels. We employ population models of two canonical formation scenarios in our analysis-isolated binary evolution involving a common-envelope phase and dynamical formation within globular clusters-with model variations for different black hole natal kick prescriptions. We show that solely with chirp mass measurements, it is possible to constrain natal kick prescriptions and the relative fraction of systems originating from each formation channel with O(100) of confident detections. This framework can be extended to include additional formation scenarios, model parameters, and measured properties of the compact binary.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 82 |
| Journal | Astrophysical Journal |
| Volume | 846 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 1 2017 |
Funding
We would like to thank Simon Stevenson, Steven Reyes, and our anonymous referee for helpful suggestions on this manuscript, as well as Scott Coughlin for assistance in debugging code. This work was supported by NSF Grant AST-1312945, NSF Grant PHY-1607709, and NASA Grant NNX14AP92G at Northwestern University. M.Z. greatly appreciates financial support from the IDEAS Fellowship, a research traineeship program supported by the National Science Foundation under grant DGE-1450006. C.R. is grateful for the hospitality of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, supported by NSF Grant PHY11-25915, and is supported at MIT by a Pappalardo Fellowship in Physics. L.S. acknowledges support from the L’Oreal FWIS Fellowship program. E.C. thanks the LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program; her time as a fellow has benefited this work. V.K. and F.A.R. also acknowledge support from NSF Grant PHY-1066293 at the Aspen Center for Physics. The majority of our analysis was performed using the computational resources of the Quest high performance computing facility at Northwestern University, which is jointly supported by the Office of the Provost, the Office for Research, and Northwestern University Information Technology. This paper has been assigned LIGO document number ligo-P1700064.
Keywords
- galaxies: star clusters: general
- gravitational waves
- methods: statistical
- stars: black holes
- supernovae: general
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Space and Planetary Science