Pith. sign in

REVIEW 1 cited by

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 2002.08200 v1 pith:H53RN7T7 submitted 2020-02-19 astro-ph.SR astro-ph.HE

Sensitivity of the lower-edge of the pair instability black hole mass gap to the treatment of time dependent convection

classification astro-ph.SR astro-ph.HE
keywords massconvectionmodelsrobustblackconvectivedatadetections
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

Gravitational-wave detections are now probing the black hole (BH) mass distribution, including the predicted pair-instability mass gap. These data require robust quantitative predictions, which are challenging to obtain. The most massive BH progenitors experience episodic mass ejections on timescales shorter than the convective turn-over timescale. This invalidates the steady-state assumption on which the classic mixing-length theory relies. We compare the final BH masses computed with two different versions of the stellar evolutionary code \texttt{MESA}: (i) using the default implementation of \cite{paxton:18} and (ii) solving an additional equation accounting for the timescale for convective deceleration. In the second grid, where stronger convection develops during the pulses and carries part of the energy, we find weaker pulses. This leads to lower amounts of mass being ejected and thus higher final BH masses of up to $\sim$\,$5\,M_\odot$. The differences are much smaller for the progenitors which determine the maximum mass of BHs below the gap. This prediction is robust at $M_{\rm BH, max}\simeq 48\,M_\odot$, at least within the idealized context of this study. This is an encouraging indication that current models are robust enough for comparison with the present-day gravitational-wave detections. However, the large differences between individual models emphasize the importance of improving the treatment of convection in stellar models, especially in the light of the data anticipated from the third generation of gravitational wave detectors.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 1 Pith paper

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

  1. Measurement prospects for the pair-instability mass cutoff with gravitational waves

    astro-ph.HE 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0

    Simulations show a 40-50 solar-mass black-hole cutoff is not guaranteed to be confidently recovered from GWTC-4-like catalogs, spurious detections are unlikely, and O4 data would reduce cutoff-mass uncertainty by at l...