Looking for the parents of LIGO's black holes
Vishal Baibhav, Emanuele Berti, Davide Gerosa, Matthew Mould, Kaze W., K. Wong

TL;DR
This paper develops a method to identify if black hole mergers observed via gravitational waves originate from hierarchical mergers, helping to understand their astrophysical formation history.
Contribution
It introduces a formalism to determine if binary black holes are remnants of previous mergers using gravitational-wave parameters, especially effective spin measurements.
Findings
Hierarchical mergers occupy a distinct region in the effective spin parameter space.
Measurement of spin parameters can support the hierarchical-merger hypothesis for specific events.
Constraints on progenitor properties can be inferred if hierarchical origin is established.
Abstract
Solutions to the two-body problem in general relativity allow us to predict the mass, spin and recoil velocity of a black-hole merger remnant given the masses and spins of its binary progenitors. In this paper we address the inverse problem: given a binary black-hole merger, can we use the parameters measured by gravitational-wave interferometers to tell if the binary components are of hierarchical origin, i.e. if they are themselves remnants of previous mergers? If so, can we determine at least some of the properties of their parents? This inverse problem is in general overdetermined. We show that hierarchical mergers occupy a characteristic region in the plane composed of the effective spin parameters and , and therefore a measurement of these parameters can add weight to the hierarchical-merger interpretation of some gravitational-wave events, including…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
