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Understanding how fast black holes spin by analysing data from the second gravitational-wave catalogue

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arxiv 2110.13542 v2 pith:WRO7XHQA submitted 2021-10-26 gr-qc

Charlie Hoy , Stephen Fairhurst , Mark Hannam , Vaibhav Tiwari This is my paper · ORCID
classification gr-qc
keywords spincatalogueblackgravitational-waveholesmagnitudesanalysisdistribution
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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abstract

The Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors have now observed approximately 50 black-hole-binary mergers, from which we can begin to infer how rapidly astrophysical black holes spin. The LIGO-Virgo Collaboration (LVC) analysis of detections up to the end of the first half of the third observing run (O3a) appeared to uncover a distribution of spin magnitudes that peaks at $\sim$0.2. This is surprising: is there a black-hole formation mechanism that prefers a particular, non-zero spin magnitude, or could this be the cumulative effect of multiple formation processes? We perform an independent analysis of the most recent gravitational-wave catalogue, and find that (a) the support for the LVC spin-magnitude is tenuous; in particular, adding or removing just one signal from the catalogue can remove the statistical preference for this distribution, and (b) we find potential evidence for two spin sub-populations in the observed black holes; one with extremely low spins and one with larger spin magnitudes. We make the connection that these spin sub-populations could be correlated with the mass of the binary, with more massive binaries preferring larger spin magnitudes, and argue that this may provide evidence for hierarchical mergers in the second gravitational-wave catalogue.

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Cited by 3 Pith papers

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  1. Signatures of a subpopulation of hierarchical mergers in the GWTC-4 gravitational-wave dataset

    gr-qc 2026-01 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Using a joint effective-spin and precession-spin model on 155 gravitational-wave events, the authors infer that the hierarchical (second-generation) merger fraction rises sharply above ~46 M_sun and peaks again near 1...

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    gr-qc 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A new toy inspiral waveform parameterized directly by precession amplitude and frequency predicts that precession is most detectable at 'plus nulls' and in a majority of isotropic maximal-spin black-hole binaries out ...

  3. Inferring the pair-instability mass gap from gravitational wave data

    astro-ph.HE 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Non-parametric analysis of GWTC-3 finds a transition at roughly 46 solar masses above which the effective spin distribution broadens and becomes consistent with symmetry around zero, consistent with second-generation ...

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