Abstract
Gravitational-wave observations of binary black hole (BBH) systems point to black hole spin magnitudes being relatively low. These measurements appear in tension with high spin measurements for high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs). We use grids of MESA simulations combined with the rapid population-synthesis code COSMIC to examine the origin of these two binary populations. It has been suggested that Case-A mass transfer while both stars are on the main sequence can form high-spin BHs in HMXBs. Assuming this formation channel, we show that depending on the critical mass ratios for the stability of mass transfer, 48%-100% of these Case-A HMXBs merge during the common-envelope phase and up to 42% result in binaries too wide to merge within a Hubble time. Both MESA and COSMIC show that high-spin HMXBs formed through Case-A mass transfer can only form merging BBHs within a small parameter space where mass transfer can lead to enough orbital shrinkage to merge within a Hubble time. We find that only up to 11% of these Case-A HMXBs result in BBH mergers, and at most 20% of BBH mergers came from Case-A HMXBs. Therefore, it is not surprising that these two spin distributions are observed to be different.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | L19 |
| Journal | Astrophysical Journal Letters |
| Volume | 938 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 1 2022 |
Funding
The authors thank Meng Sun for their feedback and assistance with our MESA simulations and Katie Breivik for help with COSMIC. We thank Jeff Andrews, Michael Zevin, Ariadna Murguia Berthier, Aldo Batta, Katie Breivik, and Will Farr for insightful conversations. M.G.-G. is grateful for the support from the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. M.F. is supported by NASA through NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51455.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute. C.P.L.B. and Z.D. are grateful for support from the CIERA Board of Visitors Research Professorship. V.K. is supported by a CIFAR G+EU Senior Fellowship, by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through grant GBMF8477, and by Northwestern University. This work utilized the computing resources at CIERA provided by 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, and used computing resources at CIERA funded by NSF PHY-1726951.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Space and Planetary Science