A new gravitational wave event reveals a binary black hole merger with total mass 190-265 solar masses, indicating black holes can form via gravitational-wave driven mergers beyond standard stellar channels.
On stellar-mass black hole mergers in AGN disks detectable with LIGO
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abstract
Black hole mergers detectable with LIGO can occur in active galactic nucleus (AGN) disks. Here we parameterize the merger rates, the mass spectrum and the spin spectrum of black holes (BH) in AGN disks. The predicted merger rate spans $\sim 10^{-4}-10^{4} \rm{Gpc}^{-1} \rm{yr}^{-1}$, so upper limits from LIGO ($<212\rm{Gpc}^{-1}\rm{yr}^{-1}$) already constrain it. The predicted mass spectrum has the form of a broken power-law consisting of a pre-existing BH powerlaw mass spectrum and a harder powerlaw mass spectrum resulting from mergers. The predicted spin spectrum is multi-peaked with the evolution of retrograde spin BH in the gas disk playing a key role. We outline the large uncertainties in each of these LIGO observables for this channel and we discuss ways in which they can be constrained in the future.
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Self-consistent spherical accretion simulations show cooling-enhanced growth of PBHs with radiative efficiency ~10^{-2} in the bremsstrahlung regime, yielding a critical seed mass of ~10^{-16} M_sun to consume a solar-mass star in a Hubble time.
Hardening binaries experience deterministic self-acceleration of their center of mass, induced precession, and plane rotation in uniform isotropic media, driving outward spiraling and eccentricity growth in all cases rather than circularization.
AGN disk capture and merger rates scale as (H/R)^{-8} and drop by 10-20 orders of magnitude in thick magnetically supported disks compared to thin thermal disks.
Semi-analytic waveform model for scalar environments around black hole binaries is validated against numerical relativity and applied to LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA data to obtain upper limits on scalar densities with tentative evidence in GW190728.
GW231123's masses and high spins are consistent with primordial black holes that accreted mass and angular momentum in the early universe within the standard PBH framework.
A new framework projects perturbations onto resonant frequencies via Hansen coefficients to produce efficient coupled ODEs for orbital elements in GW-driven relativistic binaries, demonstrated on tidal fields and accretion disks.
Hydrodynamic drag makes BBH waveforms resemble higher-mass vacuum sources, biasing matched-filter chirp-mass estimates upward for LISA sources.
GWTC-2.1 adds eight new high-significance compact binary coalescence events to the prior catalog, extending the observed black hole mass range and including candidates inside the pair-instability mass gap.
GWTC-3 catalogs 90 compact binary coalescence events with p_astro > 0.5 from LIGO and Virgo's first three observing runs, including the first confident neutron star-black hole binaries.
citing papers explorer
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GW231123: a Binary Black Hole Merger with Total Mass 190-265 $M_{\odot}$
A new gravitational wave event reveals a binary black hole merger with total mass 190-265 solar masses, indicating black holes can form via gravitational-wave driven mergers beyond standard stellar channels.
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GWTC-2.1: Deep Extended Catalog of Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run
GWTC-2.1 adds eight new high-significance compact binary coalescence events to the prior catalog, extending the observed black hole mass range and including candidates inside the pair-instability mass gap.
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GWTC-3: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the Second Part of the Third Observing Run
GWTC-3 catalogs 90 compact binary coalescence events with p_astro > 0.5 from LIGO and Virgo's first three observing runs, including the first confident neutron star-black hole binaries.