Confusing Head-On Collisions with Precessing Intermediate-Mass Binary Black Hole Mergers.

Physical Review Letters
Juan Calderón BustilloJosé A Font

Abstract

We report a degeneracy between the gravitational-wave signals from quasicircular precessing black-hole mergers and those from extremely eccentric mergers, namely, head-on collisions. Performing model selection on numerically simulated signals of head-on collisions using models for quasicircular binaries, we find that, for signal-to-noise ratios of 15 and 25, typical of Advanced LIGO observations, head-on mergers with respective total masses of M∈(125,300)M_{⊙} and M∈(200,440)M_{⊙} would be identified as precessing quasicircular intermediate-mass black-hole binaries located at a much larger distance. Ruling out the head-on scenario would require us to perform model selection using currently nonexistent waveform models for head-on collisions, together with the application of astrophysically motivated priors on the (rare) occurrence of those events. We show that in situations where standard parameter inference of compact binaries may report component masses inside (outside) the pair-instability supernova gap, the true object may be a head-on merger with masses outside (inside) this gap. We briefly discuss the potential implications of these findings for GW190521, which we analyze in detail in J. Calderón Bustillo et al., Phys. Rev...Continue Reading

References

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Nov 7, 2014·Physical Review Letters·Mark HannamMichael Pürrer
Feb 27, 2016·Physical Review Letters·B P AbbottUNKNOWN LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration
Jul 2, 2016·Physical Review Letters·B P AbbottUNKNOWN LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration
Jun 18, 2017·Physical Review Letters·B P AbbottUNKNOWN LIGO Scientific and Virgo Collaboration
Jul 12, 2017·Living Reviews in Relativity·Joseph D Romano, Neil J Cornish
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Nov 4, 2017·Physical Review Letters·B P AbbottUNKNOWN LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration
Sep 22, 2020·Physical Review Letters·R AbbottUNKNOWN LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration
Mar 13, 2021·Physical Review Letters·Juan Calderón BustilloSamson H W Leong

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