Observable spins in gravitational waves from compact binary mergers

TL;DR

This paper examines how well gravitational-wave observations can measure the effective spin in binary mergers, revealing potential biases and implications for understanding binary populations.

Contribution

It highlights the correlation between event loudness and inferred spin, and demonstrates systematic biases in spin measurement at low signal strengths.

Findings

Loud gravitational-wave events tend to have near-zero effective spins.

Fainter events show arbitrary effective spin inferences.

Simulations reveal biases in spin measurement for low signal-to-noise ratios.

Abstract

We investigate the measurability of effective inspiral spin in the detectable compact binary mergers using gravitational-wave observations. Measurements from the latest gravitational-wave transient catalog do not rule out the existence of binary systems with non-zero effective spins. However, we observe an apparent correlation between the inferred effective inspiral spin and the loudness of the gravitational-wave events-loud events typically have close-to-zero effective spins whereas fainter events tend to be inferred with relatively arbitrary effective spins. Through simulations, we demonstrate that non-negligible effective spins can be systematically inferred from non-spinning systems at small signal strengths. These two observations support the possibility that the effective spin magnitudes in the observable compact binaries are generally small. Future detections can have potential impact on the understanding of their population and other astrophysical inferences.