Pith. sign in

REVIEW 7 cited by

Constraints from gravitational wave detections of binary black hole mergers on the $^{12}\rm{C}\left(\alpha,\gamma\right)^{16}\!\rm{O}$ rate

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

Re-run · record.json Download PDF Read on arXiv ↗

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2006.06678 v2 pith:H2EGEZ2T submitted 2020-06-11 astro-ph.HE

Robert Farmer , Mathieu Renzo , Selma de Mink , Maya Fishbach , Stephen Justham This is my paper
classification astro-ph.HE
keywords blackalphagammaholeleftmassrateright
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
abstract

Gravitational wave detections are starting to allow us to probe the physical processes in the evolution of very massive stars through the imprints they leave on their final remnants. Stellar evolution theory predicts the existence of a gap in the black hole mass distribution at high mass due to the effects of pair-instability. Previously, we showed that the location of the gap is robust against model uncertainties, but it does depend sensitively on the uncertain $^{12}\rm{C}\left(\alpha,\gamma\right)^{16}\!\rm{O}$ rate. This rate is of great astrophysical significance and governs the production of oxygen at the expense of carbon. We use the open source MESA stellar evolution code to evolve massive helium stars to probe the location of the mass gap. We find that the maximum black hole mass below the gap varies between $40\rm{M}_\odot$ to $90\rm{M}_\odot$, depending on the strength of the uncertain $^{12}\rm{C}\left(\alpha,\gamma\right)^{16}\!\rm{O}$ reaction rate. With the first ten gravitational-wave detections of black holes, we constrain the astrophysical S-factor for $^{12}\rm{C}\left(\alpha,\gamma\right)^{16}\!\rm{O}$, at $300\rm{keV}$, to $S_{300}>175\rm{\,keV\, barns}$ at 68% confidence. With $\mathcal{O}(50)$ detected binary black hole mergers, we expect to constrain the S-factor to within $\pm10$-$30\rm{\,keV\, barns}$. We also highlight a role for independent constraints from electromagnetic transient surveys. The unambiguous detection of pulsational pair instability supernovae would imply that $S_{300}>79\rm{\,keV\, barns}$. Degeneracies with other model uncertainties need to be investigated further, but probing nuclear stellar astrophysics poses a promising science case for the future gravitational wave detectors.

Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. A Four-dimensional Model-agnostic Probe into the Astrophysical Origins of Binary Black Hole Subpopulations

    astro-ph.HE 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    A GPU-accelerated binned Gaussian process yields the first model-agnostic 4D BBH population in (m1, q, χeff, χp), revealing four mass-based subpopulations and new spin-mass-ratio correlations.

  2. The Stellar Winds Atlas II: Black Hole Formation at Solar Metallicity

    astro-ph.SR 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Black hole masses at solar metallicity are set by whether a star becomes a Wolf-Rayet star before collapse, and cool supergiant winds control that split.

  3. Reconstruction of Primordial Power Spectrum from Gravitational Waves of High-Redshift Black Hole Binaries

    astro-ph.CO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Gradient-descent inversion of redshifted BBH mass distributions recovers the PBH mass function and, via regularized Press-Schechter, a candidate O(10^{-2}) bump in the small-scale primordial power spectrum.

  4. 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...

  5. Searching for binary black hole mergers with deep learning in Advanced LIGO's third observing run

    gr-qc 2025-12 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A hybrid matched-filter/deep-learning pipeline recovers 31 known O3 events and reports a new tentative high-mass candidate, with sensitivity comparable to existing searches only for chirp masses above 25 solar masses.

  6. 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 ...

  7. Binary Black Hole Phase Space Discovers the Signature of Pair Instability Supernovae Mass Gap

    astro-ph.HE 2025-09 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    Applying a phase-space overlap method to GWTC-4, the paper claims first-generation black holes are truncated near 45.5 solar masses, but the cutoff follows from the assumed exponential mass prior rather than from the data.

Pith tools