Compactness peaks: An astrophysical interpretation of the mass distribution of merging binary black holes

TL;DR

This paper models the mass distribution of merging binary black holes, finding peaks around 11 and 13 solar masses consistent with astrophysical predictions, and explores the underlying population structure and spin differences.

Contribution

It introduces a population model with two mass peaks and a powerlaw component, analyzed via hierarchical Bayesian inference on GWTC-3 data, to interpret black hole mass distribution features.

Findings

Lower mass peak drops off sharply at ~11 M_

Upper mass peak begins at ~13 M_

No clear evidence for a mass gap

Abstract

With the growing number of detections of binary black hole mergers, we are beginning to probe structure in the distribution of masses. A recent study by Schneider et al. proposes that isolated binary evolution of stripped stars naturally gives rise to the peaks at chirp masses $\sim 8 M_\odot$, $14 M_\odot$ in the chirp mass distribution and explains the dearth of black holes between $\approx 10-12 M_\odot$ in chirp mass. The gap in chirp mass results from an apparent gap in the component mass distribution between $m_1, m_2 \approx 10-15 M_\odot$ and the specific pairing of these black holes. This component mass gap results from the variation in core compactness of the progenitor, where a drop in compactness of Carbon-Oxygen core mass will no longer form black holes from core collapse. We develop a population model motivated by this scenario to probe the structure of the component mass distribution of binary black holes consisting of two populations: 1) two peak components to represent black holes formed in the compactness peaks, and 2) a powerlaw component to account for any polluting events, these are binaries that may have formed from different channels (e.g. dynamical). We perform hierarchical Bayesian inference to analyse the events from the third gravitational-wave transient catalogue (GWTC-3) with this model. We find that there is a preference for the lower mass peak to drop off sharply at $\sim 11 M_\odot$ and the upper mass peak to turn on at $\sim 13 M_\odot$, in line with predictions from Schneider et al. However, there is no clear evidence for a gap. We also find mild support for the two populations to have different spin distributions. In addition to these population results, we highlight observed events of interest that differ from the expected population distribution of compact objects formed from stripped stars.