Things That Might Go Bump in the Night: Assessing Structure in the Binary Black Hole Mass Spectrum
Things That Might Go Bump in the Night: Assessing Structure in the Binary Black Hole Mass Spectrum
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DOI：
10.3847/1538-4357/aced02
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发表时间：
2023-01
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Amanda M. Farah;B. Edelman;M. Zevin;M. Fishbach;Jose María Ezquiaga;B. Farr;D. Holz
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文献类型：
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作者：
Amanda M. Farah;B. Edelman;M. Zevin;M. Fishbach;Jose María Ezquiaga;B. Farr;D. Holz
利用第三引力波瞬变星表（GWTC-3）的数据，已经确定了合并双星黑洞（BBH）的质量谱中的几个特征。这些特征是特别感兴趣的，因为它们可能编码BBH形成的不确定机制。我们评估这些特征是否具有统计学意义，或者是由于观察到的事件数量有限而导致的泊松噪声的结果。我们模拟的BBH的目录，其基础分布没有感兴趣的功能，应用之前进行的分析GWTC-3，并确定如何经常这样的功能是spuriously founded. We发现，在GWTC-3中发现的功能之一，峰值在1.35兆兆，不能单独用泊松噪声解释：峰值作为显着发生在1.7%的目录产生的一个无特征的人口。因此，这个峰值很可能是天体物理学的起源。这些数据暗示了在1000万吨处还有一个重要的峰值，尽管目前的观测无法解析这个特征的确切位置。超出幂律的其他结构，例如在1014 M的倾斜，可以用泊松噪声来解释。我们还提供了一个公开可用的包，GWMockCat，创建BBH事件的模拟目录与相关的测量不确定性和选择效果，根据用户指定的底层分布和检测器的灵敏度。
Several features in the mass spectrum of merging binary black holes (BBHs) have been identified using data from the Third Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC-3). These features are of particular interest as they may encode the uncertain mechanism of BBH formation. We assess if the features are statistically significant or the result of Poisson noise due to the finite number of observed events. We simulate catalogs of BBHs whose underlying distribution does not have the features of interest, apply the analysis previously performed on GWTC-3, and determine how often such features are spuriously found. We find that one of the features found in GWTC-3, the peak at ∼35 M ☉, cannot be explained by Poisson noise alone: peaks as significant occur in 1.7% of catalogs generated from a featureless population. This peak is therefore likely to be of astrophysical origin. The data is suggestive of an additional significant peak at ∼10 M ☉, though the exact location of this feature is not resolvable with current observations. Additional structure beyond a power law, such as the purported dip at ∼14 M ☉, can be explained by Poisson noise. We also provide a publicly available package, GWMockCat, that creates simulated catalogs of BBH events with correlated measurement uncertainty and selection effects according to user-specified underlying distributions and detector sensitivities.