Pith. sign in

REVIEW 4 cited by

Black-hole mergers in disklike environments could explain the observed $q$-$\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ correlation

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

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 2308.12998 v2 pith:RJZAKGRZ submitted 2023-08-24 astro-ph.HE astro-ph.COastro-ph.GAgr-qc

classification astro-ph.HEastro-ph.COastro-ph.GAgr-qc
keywords correlationmergersblack-holeenvironmentsobservedastrophysicalbinariesbinary
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
abstract

Current gravitational-wave data from stellar-mass black-hole binary mergers suggest a correlation between the binary mass ratio $q$ and the effective spin $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$: more unequal-mass binaries consistently show larger and positive values of the effective spin. Multiple generations of black-hole mergers in dense astrophysical environments may provide a way to form unequal-mass systems, but they cannot explain the observed correlation on their own. We show that the symmetry of the astrophysical environment is a crucial feature to shed light on this otherwise puzzling piece of observational evidence. We present a toy model that reproduces, at least qualitatively, the observed correlation. The model relies on axisymmetric, disk-like environments where binaries participating in hierarchical mergers share a preferential direction. Migration traps in AGN disks are a prime candidate for this setup, hinting at the exciting possibility of constraining their occurrence with gravitational-wave data.

Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 4 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. Dissecting environmental effects with eccentric gravitational wave sources

    astro-ph.HE 2025-06 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Resonances between oscillating environmental forces and the epicyclic motion of eccentric binaries can dominate gravitational wave dephasing over orbit-averaged drag for eccentricities above about 0.05.

  3. Nowhere left to hide: revealing realistic gravitational-wave populations in high dimensions and high resolution with PixelPop

    astro-ph.HE 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Modeling all significant correlations with the nonparametric model PixelPop recovers the true black-hole merger rate in a simulated 400-event gravitational-wave catalog, while simpler models introduce bias.

  4. Using gravitational waves and multi-messenger Astronomy to reverse-engineer the properties of galactic nuclei

    astro-ph.HE 2025-06 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    The paper proposes that AGN-driven binary black hole merger rates, masses and spins can be used to infer the properties of AGN accretion disks and nuclear star clusters across cosmic time.

Pith tools