On the gravitational lensing interpretation of three gravitational wave detections in the mass gap by LIGO and Virgo
On the gravitational lensing interpretation of three gravitational wave detections in the mass gap by LIGO and Virgo
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LIGO和Virgo对质量隙中三个引力波探测的引力透镜解释
DOI：
10.1093/mnras/stad673
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发表时间：
2023
影响因子：
4.8
通讯作者：
Bianconi M
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bianconi M
我们寻找LIGO-处女座第三次飞行中可能受到引力透镜影响的引力波(GW)事件。引力透镜延迟了GW的到来，并改变了它们的幅度--从而偏向了推断出的前身质量。这将提供一种物理上很好理解的解释，即中子星和黑洞之间的质量间隙中的GW探测，即引力透镜双星中子星(BNS)的合并。我们在LIGO-Virgo的第三次运行中选择了三个GW检测，其中至少一个组成致密天体处于质量间隙的概率被报告为高延迟低延迟-即候选透镜BNS合并。我们用双子座望远镜上的GMOS仪器对位于其天空定位误差图峰值附近的强大的强透镜星系团的观测达到了Z‘波段的灵敏度，没有探测到候选的透镜光学对应物。我们将最近的千里诺瓦光曲线模型与最近对透镜BNS种群的预测以及我们后续跟踪的对象的属性结合起来，以表明在我们的观测中可以检测到真实的光学对应。对其中两个候选星系的进一步详细分析表明，它们是同一个低质量双星黑洞合并的一对可信的图像，由一个局部星系或一小群星系透镜而成。这进一步强调，以低延迟获取准确的海量信息将提高候选透镜BN选择的效率。
We search for gravitational wave (GW) events from LIGO-Virgo’s third run that may have been affected by gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing delays the arrival of GWs, and alters their amplitude – thus biasing the inferred progenitor masses. This would provide a physically well-understood interpretation of GW detections in the ‘mass gap’ between neutron stars and black holes, as gravitationally lensed binary neutron star (BNS) mergers. We selected three GW detections in LIGO-Virgo’s third run for which the probability of at least one of the constituent compact objects being in the mass gap was reported as high with low latency – i.e. candidate lensed BNS mergers. Our observations of powerful strong lensing clusters located adjacent to the peak of their sky localization error maps reached a sensitivityin thez′ band with the GMOS instruments on the Gemini telescopes, and detected no candidate lensed optical counterparts. We combine recent kilonova light-curve models with recent predictions of the lensed BNS population and the properties of the objects that we followed up to show that realistic optical counterparts were detectable in our observations. Further detailed analysis of two of the candidates suggests that they are a plausible pair of images of the same low-mass binary black hole merger, lensed by a local galaxy or small group of galaxies. This further underlines that access to accurate mass information with low latency would improve the efficiency of candidate lensed BNS selection.