GW190521—The big one

September 2, 2020June 28, 2021 / CPLB / 3 Comments

GW190521 is a huge discovery—it a gravitational wave signal from the coalescence of two black holes to form one about $140 M_\odot$ (where our Sun has a mass of $1 M_\odot$ ). That is the largest black hole we have yet discovered with gravitational waves. It is the first definitive discovery of an intermediate-mass black hole. It is also a puzzle, as it is a mystery how its source could form…

How big can a black hole be?

Anything can become a black hole if it is squeezed enough [bonus note]: you just need to pack enough stuff into a small enough space (just like when taking a Ryanair flight). In practice, most stuff is stiff enough to push back against squeezing to avoid becoming a black hole. It’s only when you get the core of a star about somewhere between $2.1 M_\odot$ and $3 M_\odot$ that gravity becomes strong enough to collapse things down to a black hole [bonus note]. Above this threshold, can we have a black hole of any size?

The biggest black holes are found in the centres of galaxies. These can be hundreds of thousands to tens of billions the mass of our Sun. Our own Milky Way has a rather moderate $4 \times 10^6 M_\odot$ black hole. These massive (or supermassive) black holes are far bigger than any star. Even Elvis. They therefore couldn’t have formed from a collapsing star. So how did they form? The truth is that we’re not sure. It’s possible that we started with smaller black holes and fed them up, or merged them together, or a mixture of both. These initial seed black holes could have formed from stars, or possibly giant clouds of collapsing gas (which may form $10,000 M_\odot$ black holes). In any case, whatever mechanism created these black holes needs to work quickly, as we know from observations of quasars, that there are massive black holes by the time the Universe is a mere billion years old. To figure out how massive black holes form, we need to discovery their seeds.

The Event Horizon Telescope's image of M87*

The shadow of a black hole reconstructed from the radio observations of the Event Horizon Telescope. The black hole lies at the centre of M87, and is about $6.5 \times 10^9 M_\odot$ . Credit: Event Horizon Team

Between stellar-mass black holes and massive black holes should lie intermediate-mass black holes. These are typically defined as having masses between $100 M_\odot$ and $100,000 M_\odot$ . Massive black holes should grow from these smaller black holes. However, we have never found one, they are the missing link in the black hole spectrum. There are candidates: ultrabright X-ray sources, or globular clusters with suspiciously moving stars, but none of these is rock solid, and couldn’t be explained another way. GW190521 changes this, at $142^{+28}_{-16} M_\odot$ the merger remnant is without doubt an intermediate-mass black hole.

This discovery shows that intermediate-mass black holes can form from mergers of smaller black holes. However, this doesn’t yet solve the mystery of how massive black holes are grown; we need observations of larger intermediate-mass black holes for that. We’ll keep searching.

What I find more exciting about GW190521 are the masses of the two black holes that merged. Our analysis gives these as $85^{+21}_{-14} M_\odot$ and $66^{+17}_{-18} M_\odot$ . The large black hole masses extremely difficult to explain.

Estimated masses for the two components in the binary $m_1 \geq m_2$ . We show results several different waveform models and use the numerical relativity surrogate (NRSur PHM) as our best results. The two-dimensional shows the 90% probability contour. The dotted lines in one-dimensional plots the symmetric 90% credible interval. Part of Figure 1 of the GW190521 Implications Paper.

When you form a black hole from a star, its mass depends upon the mass of of its parent star. More massive stars generally form bigger black holes, but because of all the physics that goes on inside stars, it’s not a simple relationship. One important phenomena in determining the fate of massive stars is pair instability. When the cores of stars become very hot ( $\sim 3 \times 10^9~\mathrm{K}$ , just slightly less than the temperature of the mozerlla on that first bite of pizza, even though you should know better by now), the photons of light (gamma-rays) bouncing around inside the core become energetic enough to produce pairs of electrons and positrons [bonus note]. For the star, this causes some trouble. Its core is mostly supported by radiation pressure. If photons start disappearing as they are converted to electrons and positrons, then there isn’t as much radiation around, and the star will start to collapse. As it collapses, explosive nuclear reactions are triggered. Pair instability kicks in for stars with helium cores about $30 M_\odot$ . If the core is between $30 M_\odot$ and about $65 M_\odot$ , the star will blast off its outer layers, possibly repeating the cycle of pair-instability collapse and explosion many times. This results in smaller black holes than you might otherwise expect. For helium cores between $65 M_\odot$ and about $135 M_\odot$ , the explosion completely destroys the star, leaving nothing behind. These stars never collapse down to a black hole, and this leaves a gap, predicted to start somewhere between $45 M_\odot$ and $55 M_\odot$ .

Remnant masses for stars of different masses

Remnant (white dwarf, neutron star or black hole) mass $M_\mathrm{rem}$ for different initial (zero age main sequence) stellar masses $M_\mathrm{ZAMS}$ . This is just for single stars, and ignores all the complicated things that can happen in binaries. The different coloured lines indicate different metallicities $Z$ (higher metallicity stars lose more mass through stellar winds). The two panels are for two different supernova models. The grey bars indicate potential mass gaps: the lower core collapse mass gap (only predicted by the Rapid model) and the upper pair-instability mass gap. The tick marks in the middle are various claimed gravitational-wave source, colour-coded by the total mass of the binary $M_\mathrm{tot}$ . Figure 1 of Zevin et al. (2020).

The more massive of GW190521’s black holes sits squarely in the expected pair-instability mass gap. How can we form such a system?

To delve into all the details, we have put together two papers on GW190521. The high mass of the system poses challenges not just for our understanding of astrophysics, but also for our data analysis. Below, I’ll go through what we have discovered.

The signal

GW190521 was first identified in our online searches about 20 seconds after we took the data. All three of our detectors were online and observing at the time. It was a short bleep of a signal indicating a high mass system. Short signals always make me suspicious as they can easily confused with some types of glitch. The signal was picked up by multiple search algorithms, which generally is a good sign, as they all estimate the background of noise in a slightly different way. However, the estimated false alarm rates were only one per few years. That’s not terribly impressive—it’s the range where things can change as we collect more data. Immediately, checks of the signal began. We have many ways of monitoring our detectors, and experts started running through these. Microphones at Hanford picked up a helicopter overhead a few minutes later, but that’s too far away in time to be related to the signal. The initial checks all looked OK, so we were confident that it was safe to share the candidate detection S190521g.

Visualisations of GW190521. The top panels show whitened data and reconstructed waveforms from the template-free detection algorithm cWB, BayesWave (which reconstructs the signal from sine–Gaussian wavelets), and our parameter estimation code LALInference (which uses binary black hole waveforms). The bottom panels show time–frequency plots: each plot has a different scale as the signal is loudest in LIGO Livingston and hardly noticeable in Virgo. As the signal is so short, we don’t see the usual chirp of a binary coalescence clearly. Figure 1 of the GW190521 Discovery Paper.

After hearing that the initial checks were complete, I went to bed, little knowing the significance of what we had found. The initial estimates for the masses of a binary come from our search pipelines—specifically the pipelines that match signal templates to the data. At high masses, the search template bank doesn’t have many templates, so the best fitting template can be quite a way from the true value. It was only after completing a proper parameter estimation analysis that we get a good idea of the masses and their uncertainties. When these results came in we found that we potentially had something lying smack in the middle of the pair-instability mass gap. That was, if the signal were real.

While initial checks of the signal showed nothing suspicious, we always do more offline checks. For GW190521 there were a few questions that took some digging to understand.

First, the peak of the signal is around 60 Hz. This is also the mains frequency in the US, so there was concern that the signal was contaminated by noise caused by this (which would obviously be shocking). A variety of careful investigations were done subtracting out noise from the mains. In the end, it turns out that this makes negligible difference to the results, which is nice.

Second, there was concern over the shape of the signal. Our template-based search algorithms always look at how well the signal matches the template: if you get a really good match in one frequency range, but not another, then that’s an indicator that you have some random noise rather than a true signal. This consistency test is summarised in a statistic, which should be around 1 if all is OK, and larger if things don’t fit. For the PyCBC algorithm, the value for the Livingston data was about 3. Since the signal was loudest in Livingston, was this cause for alarm? One explanation could be that the template wasn’t a good fit because the templates used by the search don’t include the effects of spin precession. Hence, if you have a signal where spin precession is important, you would expect a bad fit. Checking the consistency with templates which included precession did give better consistency. However, the GstLAL algorithm also used templates without precession, and its consistency test looked fine. Therefore, it couldn’t just be precession. It seems that the key is that there are so few templates in the relevant area for PyCBC’s template bank (GstLAL had things better covered). Hence, it is hard to find a good fitting template. Adding the best fitting template from the GstLAL bank to the PyCBC search leads to it being picked out as the best template too, with a consistency check statistic of 1.7 (not perfect, but not suspicious). I think this highlights the importance of not limiting yourself to only finding what you expect: we need to include the potential for our searches to discover things outside of what we have discovered in the past.

Finally, there was the difference in significance reported by the different search algorithms. In addition to the template-based searches, we also have searches which look for more generic signals without templates [bonus note], instead using the consistency in the data from different detectors to spot signals. Famously, our non-template algorithm coherent WaveBurst (cWB) made the first detection of GW150914 (other algorithms weren’t up-and-running at the time). Usually, the template searches should do better as they know what they are looking for. This has mostly been the case so far. The exception was GW170729, our previously most massive and lowest significance detection. Generally, you expect searches to disagree more on quiet signals (not too much of an issue for GW190521), as then how they characterise the noise background is more important. We also expect the template searches to lose their advantage for very short signals, when there’s not much for a template to match, and when the coherence check used by cWB comes in especially handy. GW190521 is again found with greatest significance by cWB. In our final searches (using all the data from the first six months of the third observing run), cWB gives a false alarm rate of 1 per 4900 years (pretty darn good—at least a Jammie Wagon Wheel in biscuit terms), GstLAL gives 1 per 829 years (nice—a couple of Fruit Creme biscuits), and PyCBC gives 1 per 0.94 years (not at all exciting—an Iced Gem at best). Should we be suspicious of the difference? Perhaps cWB can pick up on something extra in the signal because actually the source isn’t a quasicircular binary [bonus note] as assumed by our templates? We know that the search templates are missing some features, like the effects of spin precession, and also higher order multipole moments. Seeing how our search algorithms cope finding simulated signals that include these extra bits of physics, we find that similar discrepancies between cWB and GstLAL happen around 8% of the time, while for cWB and PyCBC they happen about 3% of the time. That’s enough to make me go Hmm, but not enough to convince me that we’ve detected a completely new type of signal, one which doesn’t come from a quasicircular binary.

The conclusion from our analysis is that GW190521 is a good-looking gravitational wave signal. We are confident that it is a real detection, even though it is really short. However, we can’t be positive that the source is quasicircular binary. That’s the most likely explanation, and consistent with what we’ve seen, but potentially not the only explanation.

There are other sources for gravitational waves beyond quasicircular binaries. One of the best known would be a supernova explosion. GW190521 is certainly not one of these. For one thing, the signals are much longer and more complicated, and for another, we could really only detect a supernova within our own galaxy, and we probably would have noticed that happen. Another hypothesised search which could produce a nice, short bleep of a signal would be a cosmic string. Vibrations or ripples along a cosmic string can source gravitational waves, and while we don’t know if cosmic strings exist, we do have templates for what these signals should look like. Using these, we can compare how well the data are described by cosmic string signals compared to our quasiciruclar binary templates. We find Bayes factors of about $10^{30}$ in favour of the binary signals, so it’s probably not cosmic strings. Finally, you’ve perhaps noticed that I’ve been writing quasicircular [bonus note] a lot. Part of that is because it’s a cool word (25 points in Scrabble), but also because it’s possible that we have an eccentric binary. These are difficult to model, so we don’t have lots of good templates for them, but when you have a short signal, it is possible that eccentricity could be confused with spin precession. This would lead us to overestimating the distance and underestimating the masses. Initial studies do seem to show that an eccentric signal fits the data well (Romero-Shaw et al. 2020; Gayathri et al. 2020). An eccentric binary is the most probable alternative to a quasicircular binary, but it is pretty improbable. Since eccentricity is lost during inspiral, we would need something to have pumped the eccentricity, which is difficult for a binary so close to merger. I would bet my Oreos on the source being a quasicircular binary.

The source properties

If we stick with the assumption of a quasicircular binary, what can we tell about the source? We have already covered the component masses of $m_1 = 85^{+21}_{-14} M_\odot$ and $m_2 = 66^{+17}_{-18} M_\odot$ , and that the merger remnant is $M_\mathrm{f} = 142^{+28}_{-16} M_\odot$ . The plot below shows the final mass as well as the spin, which is $\chi_\mathrm{f} = 0.72^{+0.09}_{-0.12}$ . For the black holes formed from the mergers of near equal mass binaries, you’d expect the final spin to be around $0.7$ .

Estimated mass $M_\mathrm{f}$ and spin $\chi_\mathrm{f}$ for the final black hole. We show results several different waveform models and use the numerical relativity surrogate (NRSur PHM) as our best results. The two-dimensional shows the 90% probability contour. The dotted lines in one-dimensional plots the symmetric 90% credible interval. The mass is safely above the conventional lower limit to be considered an intermediate-mass black hole. Figure 3 of the GW190521 Implications Paper.

We can also get an estimate of the final spin from the final part of the signal, the ringdown. This is where the black hole settles down to its final state, like me after 6 pm. What is neat about using the ringdown is that we don’t need to assume that the binary was quasicircular, as we only care about the black hole formed at the end. The downside is that we don’t get an estimate of the distance, so we only measure the redshifted final mass $(1+z)M_\mathrm{f}$ . Looking at the ringdown, we get lovely consistent results trying ringdown models at different start times and including different higher order multipole moments, and all agree with the analysis of the entire signal using the quasicircular templates.

Final black hole mass and spin measured from GW190521's ringdown

Estimated redshifted mass $(1+z)M_\mathrm{f}$ and spin $\chi_\mathrm{f}$ for the final black hole. We show results several different insprial–merger–ringdown waveform models, which we use for our standard analysis, as well as ringdown-only waveforms. They agree nicely. The two-dimensional shows the 90% probability contour. The dotted lines in one-dimensional plots the symmetric 90% credible interval. The mass is safely above the conventional lower limit to be considered an intermediate-mass black hole. Part of Figure 9 of the GW190521 Implications Paper.

Being able to measure the ringdown at all is an achievement. It’s only possible for loud signals from high mass systems. The consistency of the mass and spin estimates is not only a check of the quasicircular analysis. It is much more powerful than that. The ringdown measurements are a test of the black hole nature of the final object. All looks as expected so far. I really want to do this for louder signals in the future.

Returning to the initial binary, what can we say about the spins of the initial black holes? Not much, as it is difficult to extract information from such a short waveform.

The spin components aligned with the orbital angular momentum affect the transition from inspiral, and have a small influence on the final spin. We often quantify the aligned components of the spin in the mass-weighted effective inspiral spin parameter $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ , which goes from $-1$ for both the spins being maximal and antialigned with the orbital angular momentum to $1$ for both spins being maximal and aligned with the orbital angular momentum. We find that $\chi_\mathrm{eff} = 0.08^{+0.27}_{-0.36}$ , consistent with no spin, spins antialigned with each other or in the orbital plane. The result is strongly influenced by the assumed prior, we’ve not learnt much from the signal.

The component of the spin in the orbital plane (perpendicular to the orbital angular momentum) control the amount of spin precession. We often quantify this using the effective precession spin parameter $\chi_\mathrm{p}$ , which goes from $0$ for no in-plane spin, to $1$ for maximal precession. Precession normally shows up in the modulation of the inspiral signal, so you wouldn’t expect to measure it well from a short signal. However, it can also influence to amplitude of the signal around merger, and we seem to get a bit of information here, which seems to prefer larger $\chi_\mathrm{p}$ . We find $\chi_\mathrm{p} = 0.68^{+0.28}_{-0.34}$ , but there’s support across the entire range.

Effective inspiral spin and effective precession spin for GW190521

Estimated effective inspiral spin $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ and effective precession spin $\chi_\mathrm{p}$ . We show results several different waveform models and use the numerical relativity surrogate (NRSur PHM) as our best results. The two-dimensional shows the 90% probability contour. The dotted lines in one-dimensional plots the symmetric 90% credible interval. We also show the prior distributions in the one-dimensional plots. Part of Figure 1 of the GW190521 Implications Paper.

Looking at the spins overall, the lack of aligned spin plus the support for in-plane spins means that we prefer misaligned spins. You wouldn’t expect this for two stars which have lived their lives together as a binary, but it wouldn’t be implausible for a dynamically formed binary. A dynamical formation seems plausible to me, but since the spin measurements aren’t too concrete, we can’t really rule too much out [bonus note].

Finally, let’s take a look at the distance to the source. Our analysis gives a luminosity distance of $D_\mathrm{L} 5.3^{+2.4}_{-2.6}~\mathrm{Gpc}$ . This makes the source a good contender for the most distant gravitational wave source ever found [bonus note]. It’s actually far enough, that we might want to reconsider our standard approximation that sources are uniformly distributed like $D_\mathrm{L}^2$ . This would be OK if sources were uniformly distributed in a non-evolving Universe, but sadly we don’t live in such a thing, and we have to take into account the expansion of the Universe, and the evolution of the galaxies and stars within it. We’ll come back to look at this when we present our catalogue of detections from the first part of the third observing run.

The astrophysics

Exploring the upper mass gap

The location of the upper mass gap is pretty well determined. There are a variety of uncertainties in the input physics, such as the nuclear reaction rate for burning carbon into oxygen, the treatment of convection inside stars or if stars rapidly rotate which can alter the cut-off. No-one has tried varying all these together, but individually you can’t get above about $55 M_\odot$ for your black hole. Allowing for new types of particles (like axions, one of the candidates for dark matter, and possibly the explanation for why teenage boys can smell terrible) can potentially increase the limit to above $70 M_\odot$ , but that is extremely speculative (I’d love it if it were true). Sticking to known physics, at face value, it is hard to explain the mass of the primary black hole from our understanding of how stars evolve.

There are potentially ways around the mass gap with help from a star’s environment:

Super efficient accretion from a companion star can grow black holes into the mass gap. Then you wouldn’t expect the total mass of the binary to over about $100 M_\odot$ , so we’d need to swap out partners in this case.
The pair instability originates in the helium core of a star. If we can find a way to grow the envelope of the star, while keeping the core below the threshold for the instability to set in, then the whole thing could collapse down to a mass gap black hole. This could potentially happen if two stars collide after one has already formed its helium core. The other gets disrupted and swells the envelope. This might be expected in stellar clusters. Similarly, a couple of recent papers (Farrell et al. 2020; Kinugawa, Nakamura & Nakano 2020) have also suggested that the first generation of stars, which have few elements other than hydrogen or helium, could also collapse down to black holes in this mass range. The idea here is that these stars lose much less of their envelopes due to stellar winds, so you can end up with what we would otherwise consider an oversized envelope around a core below the pair instability threshold
We could have two black holes merge to form a bigger one, and then have the remnant go on to form a new binary. You would need a dense environment for this, somewhere like a globular cluster where it’s easy to find new partners. Ideally, somewhere with a large escape velocity, perhaps a nuclear star cluster, which has a high escape velocity so that it is more difficult for the remnant black hole to get kicked out at any point: gravitational waves give a recoil kick, and close encounters with other objects can also lead to the initial binary getting a kick.
Especially good for growing black holes may be if they are embedded in the accretion disc around a supermassive black hole. Then these disc black holes can merge with each other whilst being unlikely to escape the environment. Additionally, they can swallow lots of gas from the surrounding disc to help them grow big and strong.

There is also the potential that we don’t have a black hole formed from stellar collapse, but instead a primordial black hole formed from dense regions in the early Universe. These primordial black holes are a another candidate for dark matter. I like that there are two options for potential dark matter-related formation channels. It’s good to have options.

The difficulty with all of these alternative formation channels is matching the observed rate for GW190521-like systems. It’s not enough for a proposed channel to be able to explain the system’s properties, it also needs to make enough of them for us to have come across one. From our data, we infer that GW190521-like systems have a merger rate density of $0.13^{+0.30}_{-0.11}~\mathrm{Gpc^{-3}\,yr^{-1}}$ . Predicted rates for the various formation mechanisms discussed above can be rather uncertain (kind of like how the exact value of a small bag full of Bitcoin is uncertain), so I would like to see more work on this, before picking a most plausible option.

Hierarchical mergers

We did do some quantitative analysis for the case of hierarchical mergers of black holes, following the framework outlined in Kimball et al. (2020). This simultaneously fits the mass and spin distribution for the first generation (1g) of black holes formed from stars, and a fraction of hierarchical mergers involving second generation (2g) merger remnants. To calibrate the number of hierarchical mergers, we use globular cluster simulations.

Using our base model, where the 1g+1g population is basically the Model C we used to describe our detections from the first two observing runs, we find that the odds are in favour of GW190521 being a 1g+1g merger. Hierarchical mergers are so rare, that it’s actually more probable that we squish down the inferred masses and have something from the tail of the 1g population.

The rate of hierarchical mergers, however, is very sensitive to the distribution of spins of 1g black holes. Larger spins give bigger kicks (even a spin of 0.1 is enough to mean remnants are hardly ever retained in typical globular clusters). If we add into the mix a fraction of 1g+1g binaries which have 0 spin (motivated by recent simulations), we improve the odds to be roughly even 1g+1g vs 1g+2g, and less common for 2g+2g. Given that we are not taken into account that only a fraction of binaries would be in clusters, which would reduce the odds of a hierarchical merger considerably, this isn’t quite enough to convince me.

However, what if we were to turn up the mass of the cluster? For our globular cluster model, we used $5\times 10^5 M_\odot$ , what if we tried $10^8 M_\odot$ , more like you would expect for a nuclear star cluster? We shouldn’t really be doing this, as our model is calibrated against globular cluster simulations, and nuclear star clusters have different dynamics, but we can use our results as illustrative. In this case, we find odds of about 1000:1 in favour of hierarchical mergers. This suggests that this option may be a promising one to follow, but we must moderate our results remembering that only a fraction of binaries would form in these dense environments.

The analysis is done using only our first 10 detected binary black hole from our first two observing runs plus GW190521. GW190521 is not the most representative of the third observing run detections (hence why it gets special papers™), so it is not exactly fair to stick it in to the mix to infer the population parameters. We’ll need to redo this analysis when we have the full results of the run to update the results. Having more binaries in the analysis should allow us to more precisely measure the population parameters, so we will be more confident in our results.

The surprise

After all our investigations, we thought we had examined every aspect of GW190521. However, there’s always one more thing. As we were finishing up the paper, a potential electromagnetic counterpart was announced.

Electromagnetic counterparts are not expected when two black holes merge—black holes are indeed black—however, material around the binary could produce light.

The counterpart was found by the Zwicky Transient Factory. They targeted active galactic nuclei to look for counterparts. These are the bright cores of galaxies where the supermassive black hole is feeding off a surrounding disc. In this case, they hypothesis that the binary had some gas orbiting around it, and when the binary merged, the gravitational wave recoil kick sent the remnant black hole and its orbiting material into the disc of the supermassive black hole. As the orbiting material crashes into the disc it will emit light. Then, once it is blasted away, material from the disc accreting onto the remnant black hole will also emit light. This seems to fit with what was observed, with the later powering the observed emission.

What I think is exciting about this proposal is that active galactic nuclei are one of the channels predicted to produce binaries as massive as GW190521! Therefore, things seem to line up nicely.

Three dimensional localisation and active galactic nucleus location

The three dimensional localisation for GW190521. The lines indicate the position of the claimed electromagnetic counterpart from around an active galactic nucleus. This location lies at the 70% credible level. Credit: Will Farr

What I think is less certain is if the counterpart is really associated with our gravitational wave source. The observing team estimate that the probability of a chance association is small. However, there is a lot of uncertainty in how active galactic nuclei can flare. The good news is that the remnant black hole may continue to orbit and hit the disc again, leading to another flare. The bad news is that the uncertainty on when this happens is many years, so we don’t know when to look.

Follow-up analyses by Ashton et al. (2020) and Palmese et al. (2021) cast the association as more uncertain. It is difficult to be confident of an association when the localization volume is so large. If we knew that this type of flare had to look exactly like the observed emission, that would help, but we can’t be that certain yet.

Overall, I think we need to observe another similar association before we can be certain what’s going on. I really hope this candidate counterpart encourages people to follow up more binary black holes to look for emission. The unexpected discoveries are often the most rewarding.

The papers

The GW190521 Discovery Paper

Title: GW190521: A binary black hole merger with a total mass of 150 solar masses
Journal: Physical Review Letters; 125(10):101102(17)
arXiv: 2009.01075 [gr-qc]
Read this if: You want to understand the detection of GW190521

This is the paper announcing the gravitational wave detection. It follows our now standard pattern for a detection paper of discussing our instruments and data quality; our detection algorithms and the statistical significance of the search; the inferred properties of the source, and a bit of testing gravity; a check of the reconstruction of the waveform, and then a nice summary looking forward to more discoveries to come.

What is a little different for this paper is that because the signal is so short, we have had to be extra careful in our checks of the detectors’ statuses, the reliability of our detection algorithms, and the assumptions that go into estimating the source properties. If you are sceptical of being able to detect such short signals, I recommend checking out the Supplemental Material for a summary of some of the tests we did.

The GW190521 Implications Paper

Title: Properties and astrophysical implications of the 150 solar mass binary black hole merger GW190521
Journal: Astrophysical Journal Letters; 900(1):L13(27)
arXiv: 2009.01190 [astro-ph.HE]
Read this if: You want to understand the implications for fundamental physics and astrophysics of the discovery

In this paper we explore the properties of GW190521. We check the robustness of the inferred source properties. For such a short signal, our usual assumption that we have a quasicircular binary is probably the most sensible thing to do, but we can’t be certain, and if this assumption is wrong, then we will have got the properties wrong. Astronomy is hard sometimes. Assuming that our estimates of the properties are correct, we look at potential formation mechanisms. We don’t come to any firm conclusions, but sketch out some of the possibilities. We also look at tests of the black hole nature of the final object in a bit more detail. A few wibbles can sure cause a lot of excitement.

Science summary: GW190521: The most massive black hole collision observed to date
Data release: Gravitational Wave Open Science Center; Parameter estimation results
Rating: 🍰🐋📏🏆

Bonus notes

Squeezing

Please hug responsibly.

Minimum black hole mass

The uncertainty in when gravity will take over and squish things down to a black hole is set by the stiffness of neutron star matter. Neutron stars are the densest matter can be, this is the stiffest form of matter, the one most resistant to being crushed down into a black hole. The amount of weight neutron star matter can support is uncertain, so we don’t quite know their maximum mass yet. This made the discovery of GW190814 particularly intriguing. This gravitational wave came from a binary where the less massive component was about $2.6 M_\odot$ , exactly in the range where we’d expect the transition between neutron stars and black holes. We can’t tell for certain which it is, but I’ve bet my M&Ms on a black hole.

It’s potentially possible that there are black holes smaller than the maximum neutron star mass which didn’t form from collapsing stars. These are primordial black holes, which formed from overdense regions in the early universe. We don’t know for certain if they do exist, but we are looking.

Positrons

Positrons are antielectrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons. This means that they share identical properties to electrons except that they have opposite charge. Electrons things that the glass is half-empty, positrons think it is half-full. Neutrinos think that the glass is twice as big as it needs to be, but so long as we have a well-mixed cocktail, who cares?

Burst searches

In the jargon of LIGO and Virgo, we refer to the non-template detection algorithms as Burst searches, as they are good at spotting bursts of gravitational waves. Burst is not a terribly useful description if you’ve not met it before, so we generally try to avoid this in our papers. A common description is an unmodelled search, to distinguish from the template-based searches which use model waveforms as input. However, it’s not really true that the Burst searches don’t make modelling assumptions about the signal. For example, the cWB algorithm used to look for binaries assumes that the frequency will increase with time (as you would expect for an inspiralling binary). To avoid this, we’ve sometimes describes the search algorithm as weakly modelled, but that’s perhaps no clearer than Burst. For this post, I’ll stick to non-template as a description.

Quasicircular

When talking about the orbits of binaries, we might be interested in their eccentricity. Eccentricity is a key tracer of how the binary formed. As binaries emit gravitational waves, they quickly lose their eccentricity, so in general we don’t expect there to be significant eccentricity for the binaries detected by LIGO and Virgo.

An orbit with zero eccentricity should be circular. However, since we have a binary emitting gravitational waves the orbit will be shrinking. As we have an inspiral, if you were to trace out the orbit, it would not be a circle, even though we would describe it as having zero eccentricity. This is particularly noticeable at the end of the inspiral, when we get close to the two objects plunging together. Hence, we describe orbits as quasicircular, which I think sounds rather cute.

The simulation above shows the orbit of an inspiral. Here the spins of the black holes also lead to the precession of the orbit, making it a bit more complicated than you might expect for a something described as circular, but, of course, not at all unexpected for something with a cool name like quasicircular. I also really like how this visualisation shows the event horizons of the two black holes merging.

Spin Bayes factors

To try to quantify the support for spin, we quote two Bayes factors. The first is for spin verses no spin. There we find a Bayes factor of about 8.3 in favour of there being spin. That’s not something you’d want to bet against, but for comparison, for GW190412 we found that is it over 400, and for GW151226 it is over a million. I’d expect any statement on spins for GW190521 will depend upon your prior assumptions. The second Bayes factor is in favour of measurable precession. This is not the same as comparing the Bayes factor between perfectly aligned spins (when there would be no precession) and generic, isotropically distributed spins. Instead we are comparing the scenario where we can measure in-plane spins verses the case where there are isotropically distributed but the in-plane spins don’t have any discernible consequences. Here we find a Bayes factor of 11.5 in favour of measurable precession. This makes sense as we do have some information on $\chi_\mathrm{p}$ , and would expect an even Bayes factor of 1 if we only got the prior back. It seems we have gained some information about the spins from the signal.

For more on Bayes factors, I would suggest reading Zevin et al. (2020). In particular, this explains why it can make sense here that the Bayes factor for measurable precession is larger than the Bayes factor for there being spin. At first, it might appear odd that we can be more definite that there is precession than any spin at all. However, this is because in comparing spin verses no spin we are hit by the Occam factor—we are adding extra parameters to our model, and we are penalised for this. If the effects of spins are small, so that they are not worth including, we would expect no-spin to win. When looking at the measurability of precession, we have set up the comparison so that there is no Occam factor. We can only win, if waveforms with precession clearly fit the data better, or break even if they make no difference.

Economically large

To put a luminosity distance of $5.3~\mathrm{Gpc}$ in context, if you put $1 in a jar ever two weeks over the duration the gravitational wave signal was travelling from its source to us (7.1 billion years, about 1.5 times the age of the Sun), you would end up with about a net worth only 7% less than Jeff Bezos (currently $199.3 billion).

GW190412—A new flavour of binary black hole

April 18, 2020June 28, 2021 / CPLB / 2 Comments

On 1 April 2019 LIGO and Virgo began their third observing run (O3). Never before had we observed using such sensitive gravitational wave detectors. Throughout O3 discoveries came rapidly. Binary black holes are our most common source, and as we built a larger collection we starting to find some unusual systems. GW190412 is our first observation from a binary with two distinctly differently sized black holes. This observation lets us test our predictions for gravitational wave signals in a new way, and is another piece in the puzzle of understanding how binary black holes form.

The discovery

On 12 April 2019 I awoke to the news that we had a new gravitational wave candidate [bonus note]. The event was picked up by our searches and sent out as a public alert under the name S190412m. The signal is a real beauty. There’s a striking chirp visible in the Livingston data, and a respectable chirp in the Hanford data. You can’t see a chirp in Virgo, the signal-to-noise ratio is only about 4, but this is why we have cunning search algorithms instead of looking at the data by eye. In our final search results, our matched-filter searches (which use templates of gravitational wave signals to comb through the data) GstLAL and PyCBC identified the event with false alarm rates of better than 1 in 100,000 years and 1 in 30,000 years, respectively. Our unmodelled search coherent WaveBurst (which looks for compatible signals in multiple detectors, rather than a specific template) also identified the event with a false alarm rate of better than 1 in 1,000 years. This is a confident detection!

Time–frequency plots for GW190412 as measured by LIGO Hanford, LIGO Livingston and Virgo. The chirp of a binary coalescence is clearer in two LIGO detectors, with the signal being loudest in Livingston. Figure 1 of the GW190412 Discovery Paper.

Vanilla black holes

Our first gravitational wave detection, GW150914, was amazing. We had never seen a black hole around 30 times the mass of our Sun, and here we had two merging together (which we had also never seen). By the end of our second observing run, we had discovered that GW150914 was not rare! Many of detections consisted of two roughly equal mass black holes around 20 to 40 times the mass of Sun. We now call these systems vanilla binary black holes. They are nice and easy to analyse: we know what to do, and it’s not too difficult. I think that these signals are delicious.

GW190412’s source, however, is different. We estimate that the binary had one black hole $m_1 = 30.1^{+4.6}_{-5.3}$ times the mass of our Sun (quoting the 90% range for parameters), and the other $m_2 = 8.3^{+1.6}_{-0.9}$ times the mass of our Sun. Neither of these masses is too surprising on their own. We know black holes come in these sizes. What is new is the ratio of the masses $q = m_2/m_1 = 0.28^{+0.12}_{-0.07}$ [bonus note]. This is roughly equal to the ratio of filling in a regular Oreo to in a Mega Stuf Oreo. Investigations of connections between Oreos and black hole formation are ongoing. All our previous observations have mass ratios close to 1 or at least with uncertainties stretching all the way to 1. GW190412’s mass ratio is the exception.

Estimated mass ratio $q$ for the two components in the binary and the effective inspiral spin $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ (a mass-weighted combination of the spins perpendicular to the orbital plane). We show results for two different model waveforms: Phenom PHM and EOB PHM (the PHM stands for precession and higher order multipoles). Systems with unequal masses are difficult to model, so we have some extra uncertainty from the accuracy of our models. The two-dimensional shows the 90% probability contour. The one-dimensional plots show the probability distributions and the the dotted lines mark the central 90%. Figure 2 of the GW190412 Discovery Paper.

The interesting mass ratio has a few awesome implications:

We get a really wonderful measurement of the spin of the more massive black hole.
We can observe a new feature of the gravitational wave signal (higher order multipole moments).
We understand a bit more about the population of binary black holes.

Spin

Black holes have two important properties: mass (how much the bend spacetime) and spin (how much they swirl spacetime around). The black hole masses are most important for determining what a gravitational wave signal looks like, so we measure the masses pretty well. Spins leave a more subtle imprint, and so are more difficult to measure.

A well measured, and convenient to work with, combination of the two spins is the effective inspiral spin parameter

$\displaystyle \chi_\mathrm{eff} = \frac{m_1 \chi_1 \cos \theta_1 + m_2 \chi_2 \cos \theta_2}{m_1 + m_2}$ ,

where $\chi_1$ and $\chi_2$ are the spins of the two black holes [bonus note], and $\theta_1$ and $\theta_2$ are the tilts angles measuring the alignment of the spins with the orbital angular momentum. The spins change orientations during the inspiral if they are not perfectly aligned with the orbital angular momentum, which is referred to as precession, but $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ is roughly constant. It also effects the rate of inspiral, binaries with larger $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ also merge when they’re a bit closer. For GW190412, we measure $\chi_\mathrm{eff} = 0.25^{+0.08}_{-0.11}$ .

This is only the second time we’ve had a definite non-zero measurement of $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ after GW151226. GW170729 had a reasonable large value, but the uncertainties did stretch to include zero. The measurement of a non-zero $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ means that we know at least one of the black holes has spin.

The effective inspiral spin parameter $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ measures the spin components aligned with the orbital angular momentum. To measure the spin components in the orbital plane, we typically use the effective precession spin parameter [bonus note]

$\displaystyle \chi_\mathrm{p} = \max\left\{\chi_1 \sin \theta_1 , \frac{q(4q + 3)}{(4 + 3q)}\chi_2 \sin \theta_2\right\}$ .

This characterises how much spin precession we have: 1 means significant in-plane spin and maximal precession, and zero means no in-plane spin and no precession.

For GW190412, we measure $\chi_\mathrm{p} = 0.31^{+0.19}_{-0.16}$ . This is the best measurement of $\chi_\mathrm{p}$ so far. It shows that we don’t see strong procession, but also suggests that there is some in-plane spin.

Estimated effective precession spin parameter $\chi_\mathrm{p}$ . Results are shown for two different waveform models. To indicate how much (or little) we’ve learnt, the prior probability distribution is shown: the global prior is what we would get if we had learnt nothing, the restricted prior is what we would have after placing cuts on the effective inspiral spin parameter and mass ratio to match our observations. We are definitely getting information on precession from the data. Figure 5 of the GW190412 Discovery Paper.

Now, since we know that the masses are unequal in the binary, the contribution to $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ is dominated by the spin of the larger black hole, or at least the component of the spin aligned with the orbital angular momentum ( $\chi_\mathrm{eff} \approx \chi_1 \cos \theta_1$ ), and similarly $\chi_\mathrm{p}$ is dominated by the in-place components of the larger black hole’s spin ( $\chi_\mathrm{p} \approx \chi_1 \sin \theta_1$ ). Combining all this information, we can actually get a good measurement of the spin of the bigger black hole. We infer that $\chi_1 = 0.44^{+0.16}_{-0.26}$ . This is the first time we’ve really been able to measure an individual spin!

We don’t yet have a really good understanding of the spins black holes are born with. Their spins can increase if they accrete material, but it needs to be a lot of stuff to change it significantly. When we make a few more spin measurements, I’m looking forward to using the information to help figure out the histories of our black holes.

Higher order multipoles

When calculating gravitational wave signals, we often use spin-weighted spherical harmonics. These are a set of functions, which describe possible patterns on a sphere. Using them, we can describe the amount of gravitational waves emitted in a particular direction. Any gravitational wave signal can be approximated as a sum of the spin-weighted spherical harmonics ${}_{-2}Y_{\ell m}(\vartheta, \phi)$ , where we use $\{\vartheta, \phi\}$ as the angles on the sphere, and $(\ell, m)$ specify the harmonic. The majority of the gravitational radiation emitted from a binary is from the $(2, \pm2)$ harmonic, so we usually start with this. Larger values of $\ell$ contribute less and less. For exactly equal mass binaries with non-spinning components, only harmonics with even $\ell$ are non-zero, so really the $(2, \pm2)$ harmonic is all you need. For unequal mass binaries this is not the case. Here odd $\ell$ are important, and harmonics with $\ell = \pm m$ are expected to contribute a significant amount. In previous detection, we’ve not had to worry too much about the harmonics with $\ell > 2$ , which we refer to as higher order multipole moments, as they contributed little to the signal. GW190412’s unequal masses mean that they are important here.

During the inspiral, the frequency of the part of the gravitational wave signal corresponding to a given $(\ell, m)$ is $f_{\ell m} \simeq m f_\mathrm{orb}$ , where $f_\mathrm{orb}$ is the orbital frequency. Most of the signal is emitted at twice the orbital frequency, but the emission from the higher order multipoles is at higher frequencies. If the $m = 2$ multipole was a music A, then the $m = 3$ multipole would correspond to an E, and if the $m = 2$ multipole was a C, the $m = 3$ would be a G. There’s a family of chirps [bonus note]. For GW190412, we clearly pick out the frequency component at $3 f_\mathrm{orb}$ showing the significance of the $(3,\pm3)$ mode. This shows that the harmonic structure of gravitational waves is as expected [bonus note]. We have observed a perfect fifth, as played by the inspiral of two black holes.

Using waveforms which include higher order multipoles is important to get good measurements of the source’s parameters. We would not get a good measurement of the mass ratio or the distance ( $740^{+130}_{-160}~\mathrm{Mpc}$ , corresponding to a travel time for the signal of around 2 billion years) using templates calculated using only the $(2,\pm2)$ harmonic.

The black hole population

GW190412’s source has two unequal mass black holes, unlike our vanilla binary black holes. Does this indicate a new flavour of binary black hole, and what can we learn about how it formed from it’s properties?

After our second observing run, we analysed our family of ten binary black holes to infer what the population looked like. This included fitting for the distribution of mass mass ratios. We assumed that the mass ratios were drawn from a distribution something like $p(q) \propto q^{\beta_q}$ and estimated the value of $\beta_q$ . A result of $\beta_q = 0$ would mean that all mass ratios were equally common, while larger values would mean that binaries liked more equal mass binaries. Our analysis preferred larger values of $\beta_q$ , making it appear that black holes were picky about their partners. However, with only ten systems, our uncertainties spanned the entire range we’d allowed for $\beta_q$ . It was too early to say anything definite about the mass ratio distribution.

If we add in GW190412 to the previous ten observations, we get a much tighter measurement of $\beta_q$ , and generally prefer values towards the lower end of what we found previously. Really, we shouldn’t just add in GW190412 when making statements about the entire population, we should fold in everything we saw in our observing run. We’re working on that. For now, consider these as preliminary results which would be similar to those we would have got if the observing run was only a couple of weeks long.

Estimated power-law slope $\beta_q$ for the binary black hole mass ratio distribution $p(q) \propto q^{\beta_q}$ . Dotted lines show the results with our first ten detections, and solid lines include GW190412. Results are shown for two different waveform models. Figure 11 of the GW190412 Discovery Paper.

Since most of the other binaries are more equal mass, we can see the effects of folding this information into our analysis of GW190412. Instead of making weak assumptions about what we expect the masses to be (we normally assume uniform prior probability on the masses as redshifted and measured in the detector, as that’s easy to work with), we can use our knowledge of the population. In this case, our prior expectation that we should have something near equal mass does shift the result a little, the 90% upper limit for the mass ratio shifts from $q < 0.37$ to $q < 0.43$ , but we see that the mass ratio is still clearly unequal.

Have we detected a new flavour of binary black hole? Should we be lumping in GW190412 with the others, or should it be it’s own category? Going back to our results from the second observing run, we find that we’d expect that in a set of eleven observations that at least one would have a mass ratio as extreme as GW190412 $1.7^{+10.3}_{-1.3}\%$ of the time. Therefore, GW190412 is exceptional, but not completely inconsistent with our previous observations. If we repeat the calculation using the population inferred folding in GW190412, we (unsurprisingly) find it is much less unusual, with such systems being found in a set of eleven observations $25^{+47}_{-17}\%$ of the time. In conclusion, GW190412 is not vanilla, but is possibly raspberry ripple or Neapolitan: there’s still a trace of vanilla in there to connect it to the more usual binaries

Now we’ve compared GW190412 to our previous observations, where does its source fit in with predictions? The two main options for making a merging binary black hole are via isolated evolution, where two stars live their lives together, and dynamical formation, where you have lots of black holes in a dense environment like a globular cluster and two get close enough together to capture each other. Both of these favour more equal mass binaries, with unequal mass binaries like GW190412’s source being rare (but not impossible). Since we’ve only seen one system with such a mass ratio in amongst our detections so far, either channel could possibly explain things. My money is on a mixture.

In case you were curious, calculations from Chase Kimball indicate that GW190412 is not a hierarchical merger with the primary black hole being formed from the merger of two smaller black holes.

Odds of binary black holes being a hierarchical merger verses being original generation binary. 1G indicates first generation black holes formed from the collapse of stars, 2G indicates a black hole formed from the merger of two 1G black holes. These are preliminary results using the GWTC-1 results plus GW!90412. Fig. 15 of Kimball et al. (2020).

As we build up a larger collection of detections, we’ll be able to use our constraints on the population to better understand the relative contributions from the different formation mechanisms, and hence the physics of black hole manufacturing.

Einstein is not wrong yet

Finally, since GW190412 is beautifully loud and has a respectably long inspiral, we were able to perform our usual tests of general relativity and confirm that all is as predicted.

We performed the inspiral/merger–ringdown consistency test, where we check that parameters inferred from the early, low frequency part of the signal match those from the later, high frequency part. They do.

We also performed the parameterized test, where we we allow different pieces of the signal template vary. We found that all the deviations were consistent with zero, as expected. The results are amongst the tightest we have from a single event, being comparable to results from GW151226 and GW170608. These are the lowest mass binary black holes we’ve observed so far, and so have the longest chirps.

We’ll keep checking for any evidence that Einstein’s theory of gravity is wrong. If Columbo has taught us anything, it is that the guest star is usually guilty. If it’s taught us something else, it’s the importance of a good raincoat. After that, however, it’s taught us the importance of perseverance, and always asking one more thing. Maybe we’ll catch Einstein out eventually.

Just a taste of what’s to come

GW190412 was observed on the 12th day of O3. There were many detections to follow. Using this data set, we’ll be able to understand the properties of black holes and gravitational waves better than ever before. There are exciting results still being finalised.

Perhaps there will be a salted caramel binary black hole, or even a rocky road flavoured one? We might need to wait for our next observing run in 2021 for sprinkles though.

Title: GW190412: Observation of a binary-black-hole coalescence with asymmetric masses
Journal: Physical Review D; 102(4):043015(29)
arXiv: 2004.08342 [astro-ph.HE]
Science summary: GW190412: The first observation of an unequal-mass black hole merger
Data release: Gravitational Wave Open Science Center
Rating: 🍨🐦🎶🐦🥴

Bonus notes

Sleep

I like sleep. I’d strongly recommend it.

Notation

Possibly the greatest dispute in gravitational wave astronomy is the definition of $q$ . We pretty much all agree that the larger mass in a binary is $m_1$ and the lesser mass $m_2$ . However, there two camps on the mass ratio: those enlightened individuals who define $q = m_2/m_1$ , meaning that the mass ratio spans the entirely sensible range of $0 \leq q \leq 1$ , and those heretics who define $q = m_1/m_2$ , meaning that it cover the ridiculous range of $1 \leq q \leq \infty$ . Within LIGO and Virgo, we have now settled on the correct convention. Many lives may have been lost, but I’m sure you’ll agree that it is a sacrifice worth making in the cause of consistent notation.

The second greatest dispute may be what to call the spin magnitudes. In LIGO and Virgo we’ve often used both $\chi$ (the Greek letter chi) and $a$ . After a tense negotiation, conflict was happily avoided, and we have settled on $\chi$ , with only the minimum amount of bloodshed. If you’re reading some of our older stuff, please bear in mind that we’ve not been consistent about the meaning of these symbols.

Effective spins

Sadly, my suggestions to call $\chi_\mathrm{p}$ and $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ Chip and Dale have not caught on.

Hey! Listen!

Here are two model waveforms (made by Florian Wicke and Frank Ohme) consistent with the properties of GW190412, but shifted in frequency by a factor of 25 to make them easier to hear:

Can you tell the difference? I prefer the more proper one with harmonics.

Exactly as predicted

The presence of higher order multipole moments, as predicted, could be seen as another win for Einstein’s theory of general relativity. However, we expect the same pattern of emission in any theory, as it’s really set by the geometry of the source. If the frequency were not an integer multiple of the orbital frequency, the gravitational waves would get out of phase with their source, which would not make any sense.

The really cool thing, in my opinion, is that we now how detectors sensitive enough to pick out these subtle details.

Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning—Astrophysics white papers

April 20, 2019August 1, 2020 / CPLB / Leave a comment

What will be the next big thing in astronomy? One of the hard things about research is that you often don’t know what you will discover before you embark on an investigation. An idea might work out, or it might not, or along the way you might discover something unexpected which is far more interesting. As you might imagine, this can make laying definite plans difficult…

However, it is important to have plans for research. While you might not be sure of the outcome, it is necessary to weigh the risks and rewards associated with the probable results before you invest your time and taxpayers’ money!

To help with planning and prioritising, researchers in astrophysics often pull together white papers [bonus note]. These are sketches of ideas for future research, arguing why you think they might be interesting. These can then be discussed within the community to help shape the direction of the field. If other scientists find the paper convincing, you can build support which helps push for funding. If there are gaps in the logic, others can point these out to ave you heading the wrong way. This type of consensus building is especially important for large experiments or missions—you don’t want to spend a billion dollars on something unless you’re really sure it is a good idea and lots of people agree.

I have been involved with a few white papers recently. Here are some key ideas for where research should go.

Ground-based gravitational-wave detectors: The next generation

We’ve done some awesome things with Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. In just a couple of years we have revolutionized our understanding of binary black holes. That’s not bad. However, our current gravitational-wave observatories are limited in what they can detect. What amazing things could we achieve with a new generation of detectors?

It can take decades to develop new instruments, therefore it’s important to start thinking about them early. Obviously, what we would most like is an observatory which can detect everything, but that’s not feasible. In this white paper, we pick the questions we most want answered, and see what the requirements for a new detector would be. A design which satisfies these specifications would therefore be a solid choice for future investment.

Binary black holes are the perfect source for ground-based detectors. What do we most want to know about them?

How many mergers are there, and how does the merger rate change over the history of the Universe? We want to know how binary black holes are made. The merger rate encodes lots of information about how to make binaries, and comparing how this evolves compared with the rate at which the Universe forms stars, will give us a deeper understanding of how black holes are made.
What are the properties (masses and spins) of black holes? The merger rate tells us some things about how black holes form, but other properties like the masses, spins and orbital eccentricity complete the picture. We want to make precise measurements for individual systems, and also understand the population.
Where do supermassive black holes come from? We know that stars can collapse to produce stellar-mass black holes. We also know that the centres of galaxies contain massive black holes. Where do these massive black holes come from? Do they grow from our smaller black holes, or do they form in a different way? Looking for intermediate-mass black holes in the gap in-between will tells us whether there is a missing link in the evolution of black holes.

Detection horizon as a function of binary mass for Advanced LIGO, A+, Cosmic Explorer and the Einstein Telescope

The detection horizon (the distance to which sources can be detected) for Advanced LIGO (aLIGO), its upgrade A+, and the proposed Cosmic Explorer (CE) and Einstein Telescope (ET). The horizon is plotted for binaries with equal-mass, nonspinning components. Adapted from Hall & Evans (2019).

What can we do to answer these questions?

Increase sensitivity! Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo can detect a $30 M_\odot + 30 M_\odot$ binary out to a redshift of about $z \approx 1$ . The planned detector upgrade A+ will see them out to redshift $z \approx 2$ . That’s pretty impressive, it means we’re covering 10 billion years of history. However, the peak in the Universe’s star formation happens at around $z \approx 2$ , so we’d really like to see beyond this in order to measure how the merger rate evolves. Ideally we would see all the way back to cosmic dawn at $z \approx 20$ when the Universe was only 200 million years old and the first stars light up.
Increase our frequency range! Our current detectors are limited in the range of frequencies they can detect. Pushing to lower frequencies helps us to detect heavier systems. If we want to detect intermediate-mass black holes of $100 M_\odot$ we need this low frequency sensitivity. At the moment, Advanced LIGO could get down to about $10~\mathrm{Hz}$ . The plot below shows the signal from a $100 M_\odot + 100 M_\odot$ binary at $z = 10$ . The signal is completely undetectable at $10~\mathrm{Hz}$ .
The gravitational wave signal from the final stages of inspiral, merger and ringdown of a two 100 solar mass black holes at a redshift of 10. The signal chirps up in frequency. The colour coding shows parts of the signal above different frequencies. Part of Figure 2 of the Binary Black Holes White Paper.
Increase sensitivity and frequency range! Increasing sensitivity means that we will have higher signal-to-noise ratio detections. For these loudest sources, we will be able to make more precise measurements of the source properties. We will also have more detections overall, as we can survey a larger volume of the Universe. Increasing the frequency range means we can observe a longer stretch of the signal (for the systems we currently see). This means it is easier to measure spin precession and orbital eccentricity. We also get to measure a wider range of masses. Putting the improved sensitivity and frequency range together means that we’ll get better measurements of individual systems and a more complete picture of the population.

How much do we need to improve our observatories to achieve our goals? To quantify this, lets consider the boost in sensitivity relative to A+, which I’ll call $\beta_\mathrm{A+}$ . If the questions can be answered with $\beta_\mathrm{A+} = 1$ , then we don’t need anything beyond the currently planned A+. If we need a slightly larger $\beta_\mathrm{A+}$ , we should start investigating extra ways to improve the A+ design. If we need much larger $\beta_\mathrm{A+}$ , we need to think about new facilities.

The plot below shows the boost necessary to detect a binary (with equal-mass nonspinning components) out to a given redshift. With a boost of $\beta_\mathrm{A+} = 10$ (blue line) we can survey black holes around $10 M_\odot$ – $30 M_\odot$ across cosmic time.

Boost to detect a binary of a given mass at a given redshift

The boost factor (relative to A+) $\beta_\mathrm{A+}$ needed to detect a binary with a total mass $M$ out to redshift $z$ . The binaries are assumed to have equal-mass, nonspinning components. The colour scale saturates at $\log_{10} \beta_\mathrm{A+} = 4.5$ . The blue curve highlights the reach at a boost factor of $\beta_\mathrm{A+} = 10$ . The solid and dashed white lines indicate the maximum reach of Cosmic Explorer and the Einstein Telescope, respectively. Part of Figure 1 of the Binary Black Holes White Paper.

The plot above shows that to see intermediate-mass black holes, we do need to completely overhaul the low-frequency sensitivity. What do we need to detect a $100 M_\odot + 100 M_\odot$ binary at $z = 10$ ? If we parameterize the noise spectrum (power spectral density) of our detector as $S_n(f) = S_{10}(f/10~\mathrm{Hz})^\alpha$ with a lower cut-off frequency of $f_\mathrm{min}$ , we can investigate the various possibilities. The plot below shows the possible combinations of parameters which meet of requirements.

Noise curve requirements for intermediate-mass black hole detection

Requirements on the low-frequency noise power spectrum necessary to detect an optimally oriented intermediate-mass binary black hole system with two 100 solar mass components at a redshift of 10. Part of Figure 2 of the Binary Black Holes White Paper.

To build up information about the population of black holes, we need lots of detections. Uncertainties scale inversely with the square root of the number of detections, so you would expect few percent uncertainty after 1000 detections. If we want to see how the population evolves, we need these many per redshift bin! The plot below shows the number of detections per year of observing time for different boost factors. The rate starts to saturate once we detect all the binaries in the redshift range. This is as good as you’ll ever going to get.

Detections per redshift bin as a function of boost factor

Expected rate of binary black hole detections $R_\mathrm{det}$ per redshift bin as a function of A+ boost factor $\beta_\mathrm{A+}$ for three redshift bins. The merging binaries are assumed to be uniformly distributed with a constant merger rate roughly consistent with current observations: the solid line is about the current median, while the dashed and dotted lines are roughly the 90% bounds. Figure 3 of the Binary Black Holes White Paper.

Looking at the plots above, it is clear that A+ is not going to satisfy our requirements. We need something with a boost factor of $\beta_\mathrm{A+} = 10$ : a next-generation observatory. Both the Cosmic Explorer and Einstein Telescope designs do satisfy our goals.

Data is pleased. Credit: Paramount

Title: Deeper, wider, sharper: Next-generation ground-based gravitational-wave observations of binary black holes
arXiv: 1903.09220 [astro-ph.HE]
Contribution level: ☆☆☆☆☆ Leading author
Theme music: Daft Punk

Extreme mass ratio inspirals are awesome

We have seen gravitational waves from a stellar-mass black hole merging with another stellar-mass black hole, can we observe a stellar-mass black hole merging with a massive black hole? Yes, these are a perfect source for a space-based gravitational wave observatory. We call these systems extreme mass-ratio inspirals (or EMRIs, pronounced em-rees, for short) [bonus note].

Having such an extreme mass ratio, with one black hole much bigger than the other, gives EMRIs interesting properties. The number of orbits over the course of an inspiral scales with the mass ratio: the more extreme the mass ratio, the more orbits there are. Each of these gives us something to measure in the gravitational wave signal.

The intricate structure of an EMRI orbit

A short section of an orbit around a spinning black hole. While inspirals last for years, this would represent only a few hours around a black hole of mass $M = 10^6 M_\odot$ . The position is measured in terms of the gravitational radius $r_\mathrm{g} = GM/c^2$ . The innermost stable orbit for this black hole would be about $r_\mathrm{g} = 2.3$ . Part of Figure 1 of the EMRI White Paper.

As EMRIs are so intricate, we can make exquisit measurements of the source properties. These will enable us to:

Measure the masses of both black holes to better than 10% precision
Reconstruct the mass distribution of massive black holes out to redshift $z \gtrsim 4$
Measure massive black hole spins to a precision of better than 0.001, giving us an insight into how they formed
Perform precision tests of the no-hair theorem describing black holes in general relativity, and test alternative theories of gravity in the strong-field regime
Cross-correlate locations with galaxy catalogues to measure the expansion of the Universe

Event rates for EMRIs are currently uncertain: there could be just one per year or thousands. From the rate we can figure out the details of what is going in in the nuclei of galaxies, and what types of objects you find there.

With EMRIs you can unravel mysteries in astrophysics, fundamental physics and cosmology.

Have we sold you that EMRIs are awesome? Well then, what do we need to do to observe them? There is only one currently planned mission which can enable us to study EMRIs: LISA. To maximise the science from EMRIs, we have to support LISA.

As an aspiring scientist, Lisa Simpson is a strong supporter of the LISA mission. Credit: Fox

Title: The unique potential of extreme mass-ratio inspirals for gravitational-wave astronomy
arXiv: 1903.03686 [astro-ph.HE]
Contribution level: ☆☆☆☆☆ Leading author
Theme music: Muse

Bonus notes

White paper vs journal article

Since white papers are proposals for future research, they aren’t as rigorous as usual academic papers. They are really attempts to figure out a good question to ask, rather than being answers. White papers are not usually peer reviewed before publication—the point is that you want everybody to comment on them, rather than just one or two anonymous referees.

Whilst white papers aren’t quite the same class as journal articles, they do still contain some interesting ideas, so I thought they still merit a blog post.

Recycling

I have blogged about EMRIs before, so I won’t go into too much detail here. It was one of my former blog posts which inspired the LISA Science Team to get in touch to ask me to write the white paper.

The O2 Catalogue—It goes up to 11

December 7, 2018January 26, 2020 / CPLB / Leave a comment

The full results of our second advanced-detector observing run (O2) have now been released—we’re pleased to announce four new gravitational wave signals: GW170729, GW170809, GW170818 and GW170823 [bonus note]. These latest observations are all of binary black hole systems. Together, they bring our total to 10 observations of binary black holes, and 1 of a binary neutron star. With more frequent detections on the horizon with our third observing run due to start early 2019, the era of gravitational wave astronomy is truly here.

The population of black holes and neutron stars observed with gravitational waves and with electromagnetic astronomy. You can play with an interactive version of this plot online.

The new detections are largely consistent with our previous findings. GW170809, GW170818 and GW170823 are all similar to our first detection GW150914. Their black holes have masses around 20 to 40 times the mass of our Sun. I would lump GW170104 and GW170814 into this class too. Although there were models that predicted black holes of these masses, we weren’t sure they existed until our gravitational wave observations. The family of black holes continues out of this range. GW151012, GW151226 and GW170608 fall on the lower mass side. These overlap with the population of black holes previously observed in X-ray binaries. Lower mass systems can’t be detected as far away, so we find fewer of these. On the higher end we have GW170729 [bonus note]. Its source is made up of black holes with masses $50.2^{+16.2}_{-10.2} M_\odot$ and $34.0^{+9.1}_{-10.1} M_\odot$ (where $M_\odot$ is the mass of our Sun). The larger black hole is a contender for the most massive black hole we’ve found in a binary (the other probable contender is GW170823’s source, which has a $39.5^{+11.2}_{-6.7} M_\odot$ black hole). We have a big happy family of black holes!

Of the new detections, GW170729, GW170809 and GW170818 were both observed by the Virgo detector as well as the two LIGO detectors. Virgo joined O2 for an exciting August [bonus note], and we decided that the data at the time of GW170729 were good enough to use too. Unfortunately, Virgo wasn’t observing at the time of GW170823. GW170729 and GW170809 are very quiet in Virgo, you can’t confidently say there is a signal there [bonus note]. However, GW170818 is a clear detection like GW170814. Well done Virgo!

Using the collection of results, we can start understand the physics of these binary systems. We will be summarising our findings in a series of papers. A huge amount of work went into these.

The papers

The O2 Catalogue Paper

Title: GWTC-1: A gravitational-wave transient catalog of compact binary mergers observed by LIGO and Virgo during the first and second observing runs
arXiv: 1811.12907 [astro-ph.HE]
Data: Catalogue; Parameter estimation results
Journal: Physical Review X; 9(3):031040(49); 2019
LIGO science summary: GWTC-1: A new catalog of gravitational-wave detections

The paper summarises all our observations of binaries to date. It covers our first and second observing runs (O1 and O2). This is the paper to start with if you want any information. It contains estimates of parameters for all our sources, including updates for previous events. It also contains merger rate estimates for binary neutron stars and binary black holes, and an upper limit for neutron star–black hole binaries. We’re still missing a neutron star–black hole detection to complete the set.

More details: The O2 Catalogue Paper

The O2 Populations Paper

Title: Binary black hole population properties inferred from the first and second observing runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo
arXiv: 1811.12940 [astro-ph.HE]
Journal: Astrophysical Journal Letters; 882(2):L24(30); 2019
Data: Population inference results
LIGO science summary: Binary black hole properties inferred from O1 and O2

Using our set of ten binary black holes, we can start to make some statistical statements about the population: the distribution of masses, the distribution of spins, the distribution of mergers over cosmic time. With only ten observations, we still have a lot of uncertainty, and can’t make too many definite statements. However, if you were wondering why we don’t see any more black holes more massive than GW170729, even though we can see these out to significant distances, so are we. We infer that almost all stellar-mass black holes have masses less than $45 M_\odot$ .

More details: The O2 Populations Paper

The O2 Catalogue Paper

Synopsis: O2 Catalogue Paper
Read this if: You want the most up-to-date gravitational results
Favourite part: It’s out! We can tell everyone about our FOUR new detections

This is a BIG paper. It covers our first two observing runs and our main searches for coalescing stellar mass binaries. There will be separate papers going into more detail on searches for other gravitational wave signals.

The instruments

Gravitational wave detectors are complicated machines. You don’t just take them out of the box and press go. We’ll be slowly improving the sensitivity of our detectors as we commission them over the next few years. O2 marks the best sensitivity achieved to date. The paper gives a brief overview of the detector configurations in O2 for both LIGO detectors, which did differ, and Virgo.

During O2, we realised that one source of noise was beam jitter, disturbances in the shape of the laser beam. This was particularly notable in Hanford, where there was a spot on the one of the optics. Fortunately, we are able to measure the effects of this, and hence subtract out this noise. This has now been done for the whole of O2. It makes a big difference! Derek Davis and TJ Massinger won the first LIGO Laboratory Award for Excellence in Detector Characterization and Calibration™ for implementing this noise subtraction scheme (the award citation almost spilled the beans on our new detections). I’m happy that GW170104 now has an increased signal-to-noise ratio, which means smaller uncertainties on its parameters.

The searches

We use three search algorithms in this paper. We have two matched-filter searches (GstLAL and PyCBC). These compare a bank of templates to the data to look for matches. We also use coherent WaveBurst (cWB), which is a search for generic short signals, but here has been tuned to find the characteristic chirp of a binary. Since cWB is more flexible in the signals it can find, it’s slightly less sensitive than the matched-filter searches, but it gives us confidence that we’re not missing things.

The two matched-filter searches both identify all 11 signals with the exception of GW170818, which is only found by GstLAL. This is because PyCBC only flags signals above a threshold in each detector. We’re confident it’s real though, as it is seen in all three detectors, albeit below PyCBC’s threshold in Hanford and Virgo. (PyCBC only looked at signals found in coincident Livingston and Hanford in O2, I suspect they would have found it if they were looking at all three detectors, as that would have let them lower their threshold).

The search pipelines try to distinguish between signal-like features in the data and noise fluctuations. Having multiple detectors is a big help here, although we still need to be careful in checking for correlated noise sources. The background of noise falls off quickly, so there’s a rapid transition between almost-certainly noise to almost-certainly signal. Most of the signals are off the charts in terms of significance, with GW170818, GW151012 and GW170729 being the least significant. GW170729 is found with best significance by cWB, that gives reports a false alarm rate of $1/(50~\mathrm{yr})$ .

Cumulative histogram of results from GstLAL (top left), PyCBC (top right) and cWB (bottom). The expected background is shown as the dashed line and the shaded regions give Poisson uncertainties. The search results are shown as the solid red line and named gravitational-wave detections are shown as blue dots. More significant results are further to the right of the plot. Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 of the O2 Catalogue Paper.

The false alarm rate indicates how often you would expect to find something at least as signal like if you were to analyse a stretch of data with the same statistical properties as the data considered, assuming that they is only noise in the data. The false alarm rate does not fold in the probability that there are real gravitational waves occurring at some average rate. Therefore, we need to do an extra layer of inference to work out the probability that something flagged by a search pipeline is a real signal versus is noise.

The results of this calculation is given in Table IV. GW170729 has a 94% probability of being real using the cWB results, 98% using the GstLAL results, but only 52% according to PyCBC. Therefore, if you’re feeling bold, you might, say, only wager the entire economy of the UK on it being real.

We also list the most marginal triggers. These all have probabilities way below being 50% of being real: if you were to add them all up you wouldn’t get a total of 1 real event. (In my professional opinion, they are garbage). However, if you want to check for what we might have missed, these may be a place to start. Some of these can be explained away as instrumental noise, say scattered light. Others show no obvious signs of disturbance, so are probably just some noise fluctuation.

The source properties

We give updated parameter estimates for all 11 sources. These use updated estimates of calibration uncertainty (which doesn’t make too much difference), improved estimate of the noise spectrum (which makes some difference to the less well measured parameters like the mass ratio), the cleaned data (which helps for GW170104), and our most currently complete waveform models [bonus note].

This plot shows the masses of the two binary components (you can just make out GW170817 down in the corner). We use the convention that the more massive of the two is $m_1$ and the lighter is $m_2$ . We are now really filling in the mass plot! Implications for the population of black holes are discussed in the Populations Paper.

Estimated masses for the two binary objects for each of the events in O1 and O2. From lowest chirp mass (left; red) to highest (right; purple): GW170817 (solid), GW170608 (dashed), GW151226 (solid), GW151012 (dashed), GW170104 (solid), GW170814 (dashed), GW170809 (dashed), GW170818 (dashed), GW150914 (solid), GW170823 (dashed), GW170729 (solid). The contours mark the 90% credible regions. The grey area is excluded from our convention on masses. Part of Fig. 4 of the O2 Catalogue Paper. The mass ratio is $q = m_2/m_1$ .

As well as mass, black holes have a spin. For the final black hole formed in the merger, these spins are always around 0.7, with a little more or less depending upon which way the spins of the two initial black holes were pointing. As well as being probably the most most massive, GW170729’s could have the highest final spin! It is a record breaker. It radiated a colossal $4.8^{+1.7}_{-1.7} M_\odot$ worth of energy in gravitational waves [bonus note].

Estimated final masses and spins for each of the binary black hole events in O1 and O2. From lowest chirp mass (left; red–orange) to highest (right; purple): GW170608 (dashed), GW151226 (solid), GW151012 (dashed), GW170104 (solid), GW170814 (dashed), GW170809 (dashed), GW170818 (dashed), GW150914 (solid), GW170823 (dashed), GW170729 (solid). The contours mark the 90% credible regions. Part of Fig. 4 of the O2 Catalogue Paper.

There is considerable uncertainty on the spins as there are hard to measure. The best combination to pin down is the effective inspiral spin parameter $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ . This is a mass weighted combination of the spins which has the most impact on the signal we observe. It could be zero if the spins are misaligned with each other, point in the orbital plane, or are zero. If it is non-zero, then it means that at least one black hole definitely has some spin. GW151226 and GW170729 have $\chi_\mathrm{eff} > 0$ with more than 99% probability. The rest are consistent with zero. The spin distribution for GW170104 has tightened up for GW170104 as its signal-to-noise ratio has increased, and there’s less support for negative $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ , but there’s been no move towards larger positive $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ .

For our analysis, we use two different waveform models to check for potential sources of systematic error. They agree pretty well. The spins are where they show most difference (which makes sense, as this is where they differ in terms of formulation). For GW151226, the effective precession waveform IMRPhenomPv2 gives $0.20^{+0.18}_{-0.08}$ and the full precession model gives $0.15^{+0.25}_{-0.11}$ and extends to negative $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ . I panicked a little bit when I first saw this, as GW151226 having a non-zero spin was one of our headline results when first announced. Fortunately, when I worked out the numbers, all our conclusions were safe. The probability of $\chi_\mathrm{eff} < 0$ is less than 1%. In fact, we can now say that at least one spin is greater than $0.28$ at 99% probability compared with $0.2$ previously, because the full precession model likes spins in the orbital plane a bit more. Who says data analysis can’t be thrilling?

Our measurement of $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ tells us about the part of the spins aligned with the orbital angular momentum, but not in the orbital plane. In general, the in-plane components of the spin are only weakly constrained. We basically only get back the information we put in. The leading order effects of in-plane spins is summarised by the effective precession spin parameter $\chi_\mathrm{p}$ . The plot below shows the inferred distributions for $\chi_\mathrm{p}$ . The left half for each event shows our results, the right shows our prior after imposed the constraints on spin we get from $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ . We get the most information for GW151226 and GW170814, but even then it’s not much, and we generally cover the entire allowed range of values.

All effective precession spin parameters

Estimated effective inspiral spin parameters for each of the events in O1 and O2. From lowest chirp mass (left; red) to highest (right; purple): GW170817, GW170608, GW151226, GW151012, GW170104, GW170814, GW170809, GW170818, GW150914, GW170823, GW170729. The left (coloured) part of the plot shows the posterior distribution; the right (white) shows the prior conditioned by the effective inspiral spin parameter constraints. Part of Fig. 5 of the O2 Catalogue Paper.

One final measurement which we can make (albeit with considerable uncertainty) is the distance to the source. The distance influences how loud the signal is (the further away, the quieter it is). This also depends upon the inclination of the source (a binary edge-on is quieter than a binary face-on/off). Therefore, the distance is correlated with the inclination and we end up with some butterfly-like plots. GW170729 is again a record setter. It comes from a luminosity distance of $2.84^{+1.40}_{-1.36}~\mathrm{Gpc}$ away. That means it has travelled across the Universe for $3.2$ – $6.2$ billion years—it potentially started its journey before the Earth formed!

Estimated luminosity distances and orbital inclinations for each of the events in O1 and O2. From lowest chirp mass (left; red) to highest (right; purple): GW170817 (solid), GW170608 (dashed), GW151226 (solid), GW151012 (dashed), GW170104 (solid), GW170814 (dashed), GW170809 (dashed), GW170818 (dashed), GW150914 (solid), GW170823 (dashed), GW170729 (solid). The contours mark the 90% credible regions.An inclination of zero means that we’re looking face-on along the direction of the total angular momentum, and inclination of $\pi/2$ means we’re looking edge-on perpendicular to the angular momentum. Part of Fig. 7 of the O2 Catalogue Paper.

Waveform reconstructions

To check our results, we reconstruct the waveforms from the data to see that they match our expectations for binary black hole waveforms (and there’s not anything extra there). To do this, we use unmodelled analyses which assume that there is a coherent signal in the detectors: we use both cWB and BayesWave. The results agree pretty well. The reconstructions beautifully match our templates when the signal is loud, but, as you might expect, can resolve the quieter details. You’ll also notice the reconstructions sometimes pick up a bit of background noise away from the signal. This gives you and idea of potential fluctuations.

Time–frequency maps and reconstructed signal waveforms for the binary black holes. For each event we show the results from the detector where the signal was loudest. The left panel for each shows the time–frequency spectrogram with the upward-sweeping chip. The right show waveforms: blue the modelled waveforms used to infer parameters (LALInf; top panel); the red wavelet reconstructions (BayesWave; top panel); the black is the maximum-likelihood cWB reconstruction (bottom panel), and the green (bottom panel) shows reconstructions for simulated similar signals. I think the agreement is pretty good! All the data have been whitened as this is how we perform the statistical analysis of our data. Fig. 10 of the O2 Catalogue Paper.

I still think GW170814 looks like a slug. Some people think they look like crocodiles.

We’ll be doing more tests of the consistency of our signals with general relativity in a future paper.

Merger rates

Given all our observations now, we can set better limits on the merger rates. Going from the number of detections seen to the number merger out in the Universe depends upon what you assume about the mass distribution of the sources. Therefore, we make a few different assumptions.

For binary black holes, we use (i) a power-law model for the more massive black hole similar to the initial mass function of stars, with a uniform distribution on the mass ratio, and (ii) use uniform-in-logarithmic distribution for both masses. These were designed to bracket the two extremes of potential distributions. With our observations, we’re starting to see that the true distribution is more like the power-law, so I expect we’ll be abandoning these soon. Taking the range of possible values from our calculations, the rate is in the range of $9.7$ – $101~\mathrm{Gpc^{-3}\,yr^{-1}}$ for black holes between $5 M_\odot$ and $50 M_\odot$ [bonus note].

For binary neutron stars, which are perhaps more interesting astronomers, we use a uniform distribution of masses between $0.8 M_\odot$ and $2.3 M_\odot$ , and a Gaussian distribution to match electromagnetic observations. We find that these bracket the range $97$ – $4440~\mathrm{Gpc^{-3}\,yr^{-1}}$ . This larger than are previous range, as we hadn’t considered the Gaussian distribution previously.

90% upper limits for neutron star–black hole binaries. Three black hole masses were tried and two spin distributions. Results are shown for the two matched-filter search algorithms. Fig. 14 of the O2 Catalogue Paper.

Finally, what about neutron star–black holes? Since we don’t have any detections, we can only place an upper limit. This is a maximum of $610~\mathrm{Gpc^{-3}\,yr^{-1}}$ . This is about a factor of 2 better than our O1 results, and is starting to get interesting!

We are sure to discover lots more in O3… [bonus note].

The O2 Populations Paper

Synopsis: O2 Populations Paper
Read this if: You want the best family portrait of binary black holes
Favourite part: A maximum black hole mass?

Each detection is exciting. However, we can squeeze even more science out of our observations by looking at the entire population. Using all 10 of our binary black hole observations, we start to trace out the population of binary black holes. Since we still only have 10, we can’t yet be too definite in our conclusions. Our results give us some things to ponder, while we are waiting for the results of O3. I think now is a good time to start making some predictions.

We look at the distribution of black hole masses, black hole spins, and the redshift (cosmological time) of the mergers. The black hole masses tell us something about how you go from a massive star to a black hole. The spins tell us something about how the binaries form. The redshift tells us something about how these processes change as the Universe evolves. Ideally, we would look at these all together allowing for mixtures of binary black holes formed through different means. Given that we only have a few observations, we stick to a few simple models.

To work out the properties of the population, we perform a hierarchical analysis of our 10 binary black holes. We infer the properties of the individual systems, assuming that they come from a given population, and then see how well that population fits our data compared with a different distribution.

In doing this inference, we account for selection effects. Our detectors are not equally sensitive to all sources. For example, nearby sources produce louder signals and we can’t detect signals that are too far away, so if you didn’t account for this you’d conclude that binary black holes only merged in the nearby Universe. Perhaps less obvious is that we are not equally sensitive to all source masses. More massive binaries produce louder signals, so we can detect these further way than lighter binaries (up to the point where these binaries are so high mass that the signals are too low frequency for us to easily spot). This is why we detect more binary black holes than binary neutron stars, even though there are more binary neutron stars out here in the Universe.

Masses

When looking at masses, we try three models of increasing complexity:

Model A is a simple power law for the mass of the more massive black hole $m_1$ . There’s no real reason to expect the masses to follow a power law, but the masses of stars when they form do, and astronomers generally like power laws as they’re friendly, so its a sensible thing to try. We fit for the power-law index. The power law goes from a lower limit of $5 M_\odot$ to an upper limit which we also fit for. The mass of the lighter black hole $m_2$ is assumed to be uniformly distributed between $5 M_\odot$ and the mass of the other black hole.
Model B is the same power law, but we also allow the lower mass limit to vary from $5 M_\odot$ . We don’t have much sensitivity to low masses, so this lower bound is restricted to be above $5 M_\odot$ . I’d be interested in exploring lower masses in the future. Additionally, we allow the mass ratio $q = m_2/m_1$ of the black holes to vary, trying $q^{\beta_q}$ instead of Model A’s $q^0$ .
Model C has the same power law, but now with some smoothing at the low-mass end, rather than a sharp turn-on. Additionally, it includes a Gaussian component towards higher masses. This was inspired by the possibility of pulsational pair-instability supernova causing a build up of black holes at certain masses: stars which undergo this lose extra mass, so you’d end up with lower mass black holes than if the stars hadn’t undergone the pulsations. The Gaussian could fit other effects too, for example if there was a secondary formation channel, or just reflect that the pure power law is a bad fit.

In allowing the mass distributions to vary, we find overall rates which match pretty well those we obtain with our main power-law rates calculation included in the O2 Catalogue Paper, higher than with the main uniform-in-log distribution.

The fitted mass distributions are shown in the plot below. The error bars are pretty broad, but I think the models agree on some broad features: there are more light black holes than heavy black holes; the minimum black hole mass is below about $9 M_\odot$ , but we can’t place a lower bound on it; the maximum black hole mass is above about $35 M_\odot$ and below about $50 M_\odot$ , and we prefer black holes to have more similar masses than different ones. The upper bound on the black hole minimum mass, and the lower bound on the black hole upper mass are set by the smallest and biggest black holes we’ve detected, respectively.

Binary black hole merger rate as a function of the primary mass ( $m_1$ ; top) and mass ratio ( $q$ ; bottom). The solid lines and bands show the medians and 90% intervals. The dashed line shows the posterior predictive distribution: our expectation for future observations averaging over our uncertainties. Fig. 2 of the O2 Populations Paper.

That there does seem to be a drop off at higher masses is interesting. There could be something which stops stars forming black holes in this range. It has been proposed that there is a mass gap due to pair instability supernovae. These explosions completely disrupt their progenitor stars, leaving nothing behind. (I’m not sure if they are accompanied by a flash of green light). You’d expect this to kick for black holes of about $50$ – $60 M_\odot$ . We infer that 99% of merging black holes have masses below $44.0 M_\odot$ with Model A, $41.8 M_\odot$ with Model B, and $41.8 M_\odot$ with Model C. Therefore, our results are not inconsistent with a mass gap. However, we don’t really have enough evidence to be sure.

We can compare how well each of our three models fits the data by looking at their Bayes factors. These naturally incorporate the complexity of the models: models with more parameters (which can be more easily tweaked to match the data) are penalised so that you don’t need to worry about overfitting. We have a preference for Model C. It’s not strong, but I think good evidence that we can’t use a simple power law.

Spins

To model the spins:

For the magnitude, we assume a beta distribution. There’s no reason for this, but these are convenient distributions for things between 0 and 1, which are the limits on black hole spin (0 is nonspinning, 1 is as fast as you can spin). We assume that both spins are drawn from the same distribution.
For the spin orientations, we use a mix of an isotropic distribution and a Gaussian centred on being aligned with the orbital angular momentum. You’d expect an isotropic distribution if binaries were assembled dynamically, and perhaps something with spins generally aligned with each other if the binary evolved in isolation.

We don’t get any useful information on the mixture fraction. Looking at the spin magnitudes, we have a preference towards smaller spins, but still have support for large spins. The more misaligned spins are, the larger the spin magnitudes can be: for the isotropic distribution, we have support all the way up to maximal values.

Parametric and binned spin magnitude distributions

Inferred spin magnitude distributions. The left shows results for the parametric distribution, assuming a mixture of almost aligned and isotropic spin, with the median (solid), 50% and 90% intervals shaded, and the posterior predictive distribution as the dashed line. Results are included both for beta distributions which can be singular at 0 and 1, and with these excluded. Model V is a very low spin model shown for comparison. The right shows a binned reconstruction of the distribution for aligned and isotropic distributions, showing the median and 90% intervals. Fig. 8 of the O2 Populations Paper.

Since spins are harder to measure than masses, it is not surprising that we can’t make strong statements yet. If we were to find something with definitely negative $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ , we would be able to deduce that spins can be seriously misaligned.

Redshift evolution

As a simple model of evolution over cosmological time, we allow the merger rate to evolve as $(1+z)^\lambda$ . That’s right, another power law! Since we’re only sensitive to relatively small redshifts for the masses we detect ( $z < 1$ ), this gives a good approximation to a range of different evolution schemes.

Evolution of the binary black hole merger rate (blue), showing median, 50% and 90% intervals. For comparison, a non-evolving rate calculated using Model B is shown too. Fig. 6 of the O2 Populations Paper.

We find that we prefer evolutions that increase with redshift. There’s an 88% probability that $\lambda > 0$ , but we’re still consistent with no evolution. We might expect rate to increase as star formation was higher bach towards $z =2$ . If we can measure the time delay between forming stars and black holes merging, we could figure out what happens to these systems in the meantime.

The local merger rate is broadly consistent with what we infer with our non-evolving distributions, but is a little on the lower side.

Bonus notes

Naming

Gravitational waves are named as GW-year-month-day, so our first observation from 14 September 2015 is GW150914. We realise that this convention suffers from a Y2K-style bug, but by the time we hit 2100, we’ll have so many detections we’ll need a new scheme anyway.

Previously, we had a second designation for less significant potential detections. They were LIGO–Virgo Triggers (LVT), the one example being LVT151012. No-one was really happy with this designation, but it stems from us being cautious with our first announcement, and not wishing to appear over bold with claiming we’d seen two gravitational waves when the second wasn’t that certain. Now we’re a bit more confident, and we’ve decided to simplify naming by labelling everything a GW on the understanding that this now includes more uncertain events. Under the old scheme, GW170729 would have been LVT170729. The idea is that the broader community can decide which events they want to consider as real for their own studies. The current condition for being called a GW is that the probability of it being a real astrophysical signal is at least 50%. Our 11 GWs are safely above that limit.

The naming change has hidden the fact that now when we used our improved search pipelines, the significance of GW151012 has increased. It would now be a GW even under the old scheme. Congratulations LVT151012, I always believed in you!

Is it of extraterrestrial origin, or is it just a blurry figure? GW151012: the truth is out there!.

Burning bright

We are lacking nicknames for our new events. They came in so fast that we kind of lost track. Ilya Mandel has suggested that GW170729 should be the Tiger, as it happened on the International Tiger Day. Since tigers are the biggest of the big cats, this seems apt.

Carl-Johan Haster argues that LIGO+tiger = Liger. Since ligers are even bigger than tigers, this seems like an excellent case to me! I’d vote for calling the bigger of the two progenitor black holes GW170729-tiger, the smaller GW170729-lion, and the final black hole GW17-729-liger.

Suggestions for other nicknames are welcome, leave your ideas in the comments.

August 2017—Something fishy or just Poisson statistics?

The final few weeks of O2 were exhausting. I was trying to write job applications at the time, and each time I sat down to work on my research proposal, my phone went off with another alert. You may be wondering about was special about August. Some have hypothesised that it is because Aaron Zimmerman, my partner for the analysis of GW170104, was on the Parameter Estimation rota to analyse the last few weeks of O2. The legend goes that Aaron is especially lucky as he was bitten by a radioactive Leprechaun. I can neither confirm nor deny this. However, I make a point of playing any lottery numbers suggested by him.

A slightly more mundane explanation is that August was when the detectors were running nice and stably. They were observing for a large fraction of the time. LIGO Livingston reached its best sensitivity at this time, although it was less happy for Hanford. We often quantify the sensitivity of our detectors using their binary neutron star range, the average distance they could see a binary neutron star system with a signal-to-noise ratio of 8. If this increases by a factor of 2, you can see twice as far, which means you survey 8 times the volume. This cubed factor means even small improvements can have a big impact. The LIGO Livingston range peak a little over $100~\mathrm{Mpc}$ . We’re targeting at least $120~\mathrm{Mpc}$ for O3, so August 2017 gives an indication of what you can expect.

Binary neutron star range for the instruments across O2. The break around week 3 was for the holidays (We did work Christmas 2015). The break at week 23 was to tune-up the instruments, and clean the mirrors. At week 31 there was an earthquake in Montana, and the Hanford sensitivity didn’t recover by the end of the run. Part of Fig. 1 of the O2 Catalogue Paper.

Of course, in the case of GW170817, we just got lucky.

Sign errors

GW170809 was the first event we identified with Virgo after it joined observing. The signal in Virgo is very quiet. We actually got better results when we flipped the sign of the Virgo data. We were just starting to get paranoid when GW170814 came along and showed us that everything was set up right at Virgo. When I get some time, I’d like to investigate how often this type of confusion happens for quiet signals.

SEOBNRv3

One of the waveforms, which includes the most complete prescription of the precession of the spins of the black holes, we use in our analysis goes by the technical name of SEOBNRv3. It is extremely computationally expensive. Work has been done to improve that, but this hasn’t been implemented in our reviewed codes yet. We managed to complete an analysis for the GW170104 Discovery Paper, which was a huge effort. I said then to not expect it for all future events. We did it for all the black holes, even for the lowest mass sources which have the longest signals. I was responsible for GW151226 runs (as well as GW170104) and I started these back at the start of the summer. Eve Chase put in a heroic effort to get GW170608 results, we pulled out all the stops for that.

Thanksgiving

I have recently enjoyed my first Thanksgiving in the US. I was lucky enough to be hosted for dinner by Shane Larson and his family (and cats). I ate so much I thought I might collapse to a black hole. Apparently, a Thanksgiving dinner can be 3000–4500 calories. That sounds like a lot, but the merger of GW170729 would have emitted about $5 \times 10^{40}$ times more energy. In conclusion, I don’t need to go on a diet.

Confession

We cheated a little bit in calculating the rates. Roughly speaking, the merger rate is given by

$\displaystyle R = \frac{N}{\langle VT\rangle}$ ,

where $N$ is the number of detections and $\langle VT\rangle$ is the amount of volume and time we’ve searched. You expect to detect more events if you increase the sensitivity of the detectors (and hence $V$ ), or observer for longer (and hence increase $T$ ). In our calculation, we included GW170608 in $N$ , even though it was found outside of standard observing time. Really, we should increase $\langle VT\rangle$ to factor in the extra time outside of standard observing time when we could have made a detection. This is messy to calculate though, as there’s not really a good way to check this. However, it’s only a small fraction of the time (so the extra $T$ should be small), and for much of the sensitivity of the detectors will be poor (so $V$ will be small too). Therefore, we estimated any bias from neglecting this is smaller than our uncertainty from the calibration of the detectors, and not worth worrying about.

New sources

We saw our first binary black hole shortly after turning on the Advanced LIGO detectors. We saw our first binary neutron star shortly after turning on the Advanced Virgo detector. My money is therefore on our first neutron star–black hole binary shortly after we turn on the KAGRA detector. Because science…

Accuracy of inference on the physics of binary evolution from gravitational-wave observations

June 11, 2018July 9, 2019 / CPLB / Leave a comment

Gravitational-wave astronomy lets us observing binary black holes. These systems, being made up of two black holes, are pretty difficult to study by any other means. It has long been argued that with this new information we can unravel the mysteries of stellar evolution. Just as a palaeontologist can discover how long-dead animals lived from their bones, we can discover how massive stars lived by studying their black hole remnants. In this paper, we quantify how much we can really learn from this black hole palaeontology—after 1000 detections, we should pin down some of the most uncertain parameters in binary evolution to a few percent precision.

Life as a binary

There are many proposed ways of making a binary black hole. The current leading contender is isolated binary evolution: start with a binary star system (most stars are in binaries or higher multiples, our lonesome Sun is a little unusual), and let the stars evolve together. Only a fraction will end with black holes close enough to merge within the age of the Universe, but these would be the sources of the signals we see with LIGO and Virgo. We consider this isolated binary scenario in this work [bonus note].

Now, you might think that with stars being so fundamentally important to astronomy, and with binary stars being so common, we’d have the evolution of binaries figured out by now. It turns out it’s actually pretty messy, so there’s lots of work to do. We consider constraining four parameters which describe the bits of binary physics which we are currently most uncertain of:

Black hole natal kicks—the push black holes receive when they are born in supernova explosions. We now the neutron stars get kicks, but we’re less certain for black holes [bonus note].
Common envelope efficiency—one of the most intricate bits of physics about binaries is how mass is transferred between stars. As they start exhausting their nuclear fuel they puff up, so material from the outer envelope of one star may be stripped onto the other. In the most extreme cases, a common envelope may form, where so much mass is piled onto the companion, that both stars live in a single fluffy envelope. Orbiting inside the envelope helps drag the two stars closer together, bringing them closer to merging. The efficiency determines how quickly the envelope becomes unbound, ending this phase.
Mass loss rates during the Wolf–Rayet (not to be confused with Wolf 359) and luminous blue variable phases–stars lose mass through out their lives, but we’re not sure how much. For stars like our Sun, mass loss is low, there is enough to gives us the aurora, but it doesn’t affect the Sun much. For bigger and hotter stars, mass loss can be significant. We consider two evolutionary phases of massive stars where mass loss is high, and currently poorly known. Mass could be lost in clumps, rather than a smooth stream, making it difficult to measure or simulate.

We use parameters describing potential variations in these properties are ingredients to the COMPAS population synthesis code. This rapidly (albeit approximately) evolves a population of stellar binaries to calculate which will produce merging binary black holes.

The question is now which parameters affect our gravitational-wave measurements, and how accurately we can measure those which do?

Merger rate with redshift and chirp mass

Binary black hole merger rate at three different redshifts $z$ as calculated by COMPAS. We show the rate in 30 different chirp mass bins for our default population parameters. The caption gives the total rate for all masses. Figure 2 of Barrett et al. (2018)

Gravitational-wave observations

For our deductions, we use two pieces of information we will get from LIGO and Virgo observations: the total number of detections, and the distributions of chirp masses. The chirp mass is a combination of the two black hole masses that is often well measured—it is the most important quantity for controlling the inspiral, so it is well measured for low mass binaries which have a long inspiral, but is less well measured for higher mass systems. In reality we’ll have much more information, so these results should be the minimum we can actually do.

We consider the population after 1000 detections. That sounds like a lot, but we should have collected this many detections after just 2 or 3 years observing at design sensitivity. Our default COMPAS model predicts 484 detections per year of observing time! Honestly, I’m a little scared about having this many signals…

For a set of population parameters (black hole natal kick, common envelope efficiency, luminous blue variable mass loss and Wolf–Rayet mass loss), COMPAS predicts the number of detections and the fraction of detections as a function of chirp mass. Using these, we can work out the probability of getting the observed number of detections and fraction of detections within different chirp mass ranges. This is the likelihood function: if a given model is correct we are more likely to get results similar to its predictions than further away, although we expect their to be some scatter.

If you like equations, the from of our likelihood is explained in this bonus note. If you don’t like equations, there’s one lurking in the paragraph below. Just remember, that it can’t see you if you don’t move. It’s OK to skip the equation.

To determine how sensitive we are to each of the population parameters, we see how the likelihood changes as we vary these. The more the likelihood changes, the easier it should be to measure that parameter. We wrap this up in terms of the Fisher information matrix. This is defined as

$\displaystyle F_{ij} = -\left\langle\frac{\partial^2\ln \mathcal{L}(\mathcal{D}|\left\{\lambda\right\})}{\partial \lambda_i \partial\lambda_j}\right\rangle$ ,

where $\mathcal{L}(\mathcal{D}|\left\{\lambda\right\})$ is the likelihood for data $\mathcal{D}$ (the number of observations and their chirp mass distribution in our case), $\left\{\lambda\right\}$ are our parameters (natal kick, etc.), and the angular brackets indicate the average over the population parameters. In statistics terminology, this is the variance of the score, which I think sounds cool. The Fisher information matrix nicely quantifies how much information we can lean about the parameters, including the correlations between them (so we can explore degeneracies). The inverse of the Fisher information matrix gives a lower bound on the covariance matrix (the multidemensional generalisation of the variance in a normal distribution) for the parameters $\left\{\lambda\right\}$ . In the limit of a large number of detections, we can use the Fisher information matrix to estimate the accuracy to which we measure the parameters [bonus note].

We simulated several populations of binary black hole signals, and then calculate measurement uncertainties for our four population uncertainties to see what we could learn from these measurements.

Results

Using just the rate information, we find that we can constrain a combination of the common envelope efficiency and the Wolf–Rayet mass loss rate. Increasing the common envelope efficiency ends the common envelope phase earlier, leaving the binary further apart. Wider binaries take longer to merge, so this reduces the merger rate. Similarly, increasing the Wolf–Rayet mass loss rate leads to wider binaries and smaller black holes, which take longer to merge through gravitational-wave emission. Since the two parameters have similar effects, they are anticorrelated. We can increase one and still get the same number of detections if we decrease the other. There’s a hint of a similar correlation between the common envelope efficiency and the luminous blue variable mass loss rate too, but it’s not quite significant enough for us to be certain it’s there.

Correaltions between population parameters

Fisher information matrix estimates for fractional measurement precision of the four population parameters: the black hole natal kick $\sigma_\mathrm{kick}$ , the common envelope efficiency $\alpha_\mathrm{CE}$ , the Wolf–Rayet mass loss rate $f_\mathrm{WR}$ , and the luminous blue variable mass loss rate $f_\mathrm{LBV}$ . There is an anticorrealtion between $f_\mathrm{WR}$ and $\alpha_\mathrm{CE}$ , and hints at a similar anticorrelation between $f_|mathrm{LBV}$ and $\alpha_\mathrm{CE}$ . We show 1500 different realisations of the binary population to give an idea of scatter. Figure 6 of Barrett et al. (2018)

Adding in the chirp mass distribution gives us more information, and improves our measurement accuracies. The fraction uncertainties are about 2% for the two mass loss rates and the common envelope efficiency, and about 5% for the black hole natal kick. We’re less sensitive to the natal kick because the most massive black holes don’t receive a kick, and so are unaffected by the kick distribution [bonus note]. In any case, these measurements are exciting! With this type of precision, we’ll really be able to learn something about the details of binary evolution.

Standard deviation of measurements of population parameters

Measurement precision for the four population parameters after 1000 detections. We quantify the precision with the standard deviation estimated from the Fisher inforamtion matrix. We show results from 1500 realisations of the population to give an idea of scatter. Figure 5 of Barrett et al. (2018)

The accuracy of our measurements will improve (on average) with the square root of the number of gravitational-wave detections. So we can expect 1% measurements after about 4000 observations. However, we might be able to get even more improvement by combining constraints from other types of observation. Combining different types of observation can help break degeneracies. I’m looking forward to building a concordance model of binary evolution, and figuring out exactly how massive stars live their lives.

arXiv: 1711.06287 [astro-ph.HE]
Journal: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society; 477(4):4685–4695; 2018
Favourite dinosaur: Professor Science

Bonus notes

Channel selection

In practise, we will need to worry about how binary black holes are formed, via isolated evolution or otherwise, before inferring the parameters describing binary evolution. This makes the problem more complicated. Some parameters, like mass loss rates or black hole natal kicks, might be common across multiple channels, while others are not. There are a number of ways we might be able to tell different formation mechanisms apart, such as by using spin measurements.

Kick distribution

We model the supernova kicks $v_\mathrm{kick}$ as following a Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution,

$\displaystyle p(v_\mathrm{kick}) = \sqrt{\frac{2}{\pi}} \frac{v_\mathrm{kick}^2}{\sigma_\mathrm{kick}^3} \exp\left(\frac{-v_\mathrm{kick}^2}{2\sigma_\mathrm{kick}^2}\right)$ ,

where $\sigma_\mathrm{kick}$ is the unknown population parameter. The natal kick received by the black hole $v^*_\mathrm{kick}$ is not the same as this, however, as we assume some of the material ejected by the supernova falls back, reducing the over kick. The final natal kick is

$v^*_\mathrm{kick} = (1-f_\mathrm{fb})v_\mathrm{kick}$ ,

where $f_\mathrm{fb}$ is the fraction that falls back, taken from Fryer et al. (2012). The fraction is greater for larger black holes, so the biggest black holes get no kicks. This means that the largest black holes are unaffected by the value of $\sigma_\mathrm{kick}$ .

The likelihood

In this analysis, we have two pieces of information: the number of detections, and the chirp masses of the detections. The first is easy to summarise with a single number. The second is more complicated, and we consider the fraction of events within different chirp mass bins.

Our COMPAS model predicts the merger rate $\mu$ and the probability of falling in each chirp mass bin $p_k$ (we factor measurement uncertainty into this). Our observations are the the total number of detections $N_\mathrm{obs}$ and the number in each chirp mass bin $c_k$ ( $N_\mathrm{obs} = \sum_k c_k$ ). The likelihood is the probability of these observations given the model predictions. We can split the likelihood into two pieces, one for the rate, and one for the chirp mass distribution,

$\mathcal{L} = \mathcal{L}_\mathrm{rate} \times \mathcal{L}_\mathrm{mass}$ .

For the rate likelihood, we need the probability of observing $N_\mathrm{obs}$ given the predicted rate $\mu$ . This is given by a Poisson distribution,

$\displaystyle \mathcal{L}_\mathrm{rate} = \exp(-\mu t_\mathrm{obs}) \frac{(\mu t_\mathrm{obs})^{N_\mathrm{obs}}}{N_\mathrm{obs}!}$ ,

where $t_\mathrm{obs}$ is the total observing time. For the chirp mass likelihood, we the probability of getting a number of detections in each bin, given the predicted fractions. This is given by a multinomial distribution,

$\displaystyle \mathcal{L}_\mathrm{mass} = \frac{N_\mathrm{obs}!}{\prod_k c_k!} \prod_k p_k^{c_k}$ .

These look a little messy, but they simplify when you take the logarithm, as we need to do for the Fisher information matrix.

When we substitute in our likelihood into the expression for the Fisher information matrix, we get

$\displaystyle F_{ij} = \mu t_\mathrm{obs} \left[ \frac{1}{\mu^2} \frac{\partial \mu}{\partial \lambda_i} \frac{\partial \mu}{\partial \lambda_j} + \sum_k\frac{1}{p_k} \frac{\partial p_k}{\partial \lambda_i} \frac{\partial p_k}{\partial \lambda_j} \right]$ .

Conveniently, although we only need to evaluate first-order derivatives, even though the Fisher information matrix is defined in terms of second derivatives. The expected number of events is $\langle N_\mathrm{obs} \rangle = \mu t_\mathrm{obs}$ . Therefore, we can see that the measurement uncertainty defined by the inverse of the Fisher information matrix, scales on average as $N_\mathrm{obs}^{-1/2}$ .

For anyone worrying about using the likelihood rather than the posterior for these estimates, the high number of detections [bonus note] should mean that the information we’ve gained from the data overwhelms our prior, meaning that the shape of the posterior is dictated by the shape of the likelihood.

Interpretation of the Fisher information matrix

As an alternative way of looking at the Fisher information matrix, we can consider the shape of the likelihood close to its peak. Around the maximum likelihood point, the first-order derivatives of the likelihood with respect to the population parameters is zero (otherwise it wouldn’t be the maximum). The maximum likelihood values of $N_\mathrm{obs} = \mu t_\mathrm{obs}$ and $c_k = N_\mathrm{obs} p_k$ are the same as their expectation values. The second-order derivatives are given by the expression we have worked out for the Fisher information matrix. Therefore, in the region around the maximum likelihood point, the Fisher information matrix encodes all the relevant information about the shape of the likelihood.

So long as we are working close to the maximum likelihood point, we can approximate the distribution as a multidimensional normal distribution with its covariance matrix determined by the inverse of the Fisher information matrix. Our results for the measurement uncertainties are made subject to this approximation (which we did check was OK).

Approximating the likelihood this way should be safe in the limit of large $N_\mathrm{obs}$ . As we get more detections, statistical uncertainties should reduce, with the peak of the distribution homing in on the maximum likelihood value, and its width narrowing. If you take the limit of $N_\mathrm{obs} \rightarrow \infty$ , you’ll see that the distribution basically becomes a delta function at the maximum likelihood values. To check that our $N_\mathrm{obs} = 1000$ was large enough, we verified that higher-order derivatives were still small.

Michele Vallisneri has a good paper looking at using the Fisher information matrix for gravitational wave parameter estimation (rather than our problem of binary population synthesis). There is a good discussion of its range of validity. The high signal-to-noise ratio limit for gravitational wave signals corresponds to our high number of detections limit.

GW170608—The underdog

November 16, 2017January 22, 2020 / CPLB / 2 Comments

Detected in June, GW170608 has had a difficult time. It was challenging to analyse, and neglected in favour of its louder and shinier siblings. However, we can now introduce you to our smallest chirp-mass binary black hole system!

The growing family of black holes. From Dawn Finney.

Our family of binary black holes is now growing large. During our first observing run (O1) we found three: GW150914, LVT151012 and GW151226. The advanced detector observing run (O2) ran from 30 November 2016 to 25 August 2017 (with a couple of short breaks). From our O1 detections, we were expecting roughly one binary black hole per month. The first same in January, GW170104, and we have announced the first detection which involved Virgo from August, GW170814, so you might be wondering what happened in-between? Pretty much everything was dropped following the detection of our first binary neutron star system, GW170817, as a sizeable fraction of the astronomical community managed to observe its electromagnetic counterparts. Now, we are starting to dig our way out of the O2 back-log.

On 8 June 2017, a chirp was found in data from LIGO Livingston. At the time, LIGO Hanford was undergoing planned engineering work [bonus explanation]. We would not normally analyse this data, as the detector is disturbed; however, we had to follow up on the potential signal in Livingston. Only low frequency data in Hanford should have been affected, so we limited our analysis to above 30 Hz (this sounds easier than it is—I was glad I was not on rota to analyse this event [bonus note]). A coincident signal was found [bonus note]. Hello GW170608, the June event!

Time–frequency plots for GW170608 as measured by LIGO Hanford and Livingston. The chirp is clearer in Hanford, despite it being less sensitive, because of the sources position. Figure 1 of the GW170608 Paper.

Analysing data from both Hanford and Livingston (limiting Hanford to above 30 Hz) [bonus note], GW170608 was found by both of our offline searches for binary signals. PyCBC detected it with a false alarm rate of less than 1 in 3000 years, and GstLAL estimated a false alarm rate of 1 in 160000 years. The signal was also picked up by coherent WaveBurst, which doesn’t use waveform templates, and so is more flexible in what it can detect at the cost off sensitivity: this analysis estimates a false alarm rate of about 1 in 30 years. GW170608 probably isn’t a bit of random noise.

GW170608 comes from a low mass binary. Well, relatively low mass for a binary black hole. For low mass systems, we can measure the chirp mass $\mathcal{M}$ , the particular combination of the two black hole masses which governs the inspiral, well. For GW170608, the chirp mass is $7.9_{-0.2}^{+0.2} M_\odot$ . This is the smallest chirp mass we’ve ever measured, the next smallest is GW151226 with $8.9_{-0.3}^{+0.3} M_\odot$ . GW170608 is probably the lowest mass binary we’ve found—the total mass and individual component masses aren’t as well measured as the chirp mass, so there is small probability (~11%) that GW151226 is actually lower mass. The plot below compares the two.

Estimated masses $m_1 \geq m_2$ for the two black holes in the binary. The two-dimensional shows the probability distribution for GW170608 as well as 50% and 90% contours for GW151226, the other contender for the lightest black hole binary. The one-dimensional plots on the sides show results using different waveform models. The dotted lines mark the edge of our 90% probability intervals. The one-dimensional plots at the top show the probability distributions for the total mass $M$ and chirp mass $\mathcal{M}$ . Figure 2 of the GW170608 Paper. I think this plot is neat.

One caveat with regards to the masses is that the current results only consider spin magnitudes up to 0.89, as opposed to the usual 0.99. There is a correlation between the mass ratio and the spins: you can have a more unequal mass binary with larger spins. There’s not a lot of support for large spins, so it shouldn’t make too much difference. We use the full range in updated analysis in the O2 Catalogue Paper.

Speaking of spins, GW170608 seems to prefer small spins aligned with the angular momentum; spins are difficult to measure, so there’s a lot of uncertainty here. The best measured combination is the effective inspiral spin parameter $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ . This is a combination of the spins aligned with the orbital angular momentum. For GW170608 it is $0.07_{-0.09}^{+0.23}$ , so consistent with zero and leaning towards being small and positive. For GW151226 it was $0.21_{-0.10}^{+0.20}$ , and we could exclude zero spin (at least one of the black holes must have some spin). The plot below shows the probability distribution for the two component spins (you can see the cut at a maximum magnitude of 0.89). We prefer small spins, and generally prefer spins in the upper half of the plots, but we can’t make any definite statements other than both spins aren’t large and antialigned with the orbital angular momentum.

Orientation and magnitudes of the two spins

Estimated orientation and magnitude of the two component spins. The distribution for the more massive black hole is on the left, and for the smaller black hole on the right. The probability is binned into areas which have uniform prior probabilities, so if we had learnt nothing, the plot would be uniform. This analysis assumed spin magnitudes less than 0.89, which is why there is an apparent cut-off. Part of Figure 3 of the GW170608 Paper. For the record, I voted against this colour scheme.

The properties of GW170608’s source are consistent with those inferred from observations of low-mass X-ray binaries (here the low-mass refers to the companion star, not the black hole). These are systems where mass overflows from a star onto a black hole, swirling around in an accretion disc before plunging in. We measure the X-rays emitted from the hot gas from the disc, and these measurements can be used to estimate the mass and spin of the black hole. The similarity suggests that all these black holes—observed with X-rays or with gravitational waves—may be part of the same family.

Estimated black hole masses inferred from low-mass X-ray binary observations. Figure 1 of Farr et al. (2011). The masses overlap those of the lower mass binary black holes found by LIGO and Virgo.

We’ll present update merger rates and results for testing general relativity in our end-of-O2 paper. The low mass of GW170608’s source will make it a useful addition to our catalogue here. Small doesn’t mean unimportant.

Title: GW170608: Observation of a 19 solar-mass binary black hole coalescence
Journal: Astrophysical Journal Letters; 851(2):L35(11); 2017
arXiv: 1711.05578 [gr-qc] [bonus note]
Science summary: GW170608: LIGO’s lightest black hole binary?
Data release: LIGO Open Science Center

If you’re looking for the most up-to-date results regarding GW170608, check out the O2 Catalogue Paper.

Bonus notes

Detector engineering

A lot of time and effort goes into monitoring, maintaining and tweaking the detectors so that they achieve the best possible performance. The majority of work on the detectors happens during engineering breaks between observing runs, as we progress towards design sensitivity. However, some work is also needed during observing runs, to keep the detectors healthy.

On 8 June, Hanford was undergoing angle-to-length (A2L) decoupling, a regular maintenance procedure which minimises the coupling between the angular position of the test-mass mirrors and the measurement of strain. Our gravitational-wave detectors carefully measure the time taken for laser light to bounce between the test-mass mirrors in their arms. If one of these mirrors gets slightly tilted, then the laser could bounce of part of the mirror which is slightly closer or further away than usual: we measure a change in travel time even though the length of the arm is the same. To avoid this, the detectors have control systems designed to minimise angular disturbances. Every so often, it is necessary to check that these are calibrated properly. To do this, the mirrors are given little pushes to rotate them in various directions, and we measure the output to see the impact.

Coupling of angular disturbances to length

Examples of how angular fluctuations can couple to length measurements. Here are examples of how pitch $p$ rotations in the suspension level above the test mass (L3 is the test mass, L2 is the level above) can couple to length measurement $l$ . Yaw fluctuations (rotations about the vertical axis) can also have an impact. Figure 1 of Kasprzack & Yu (2016).

The angular pushes are done at specific frequencies, so we we can tease apart the different effects of rotations in different directions. The frequencies are in the range 19–23 Hz. 30 Hz is a safe cut-off for effects of the procedure (we see no disturbances above this frequency).

Imprint of angular coupling testing in Hanford. The left panel shows a spectrogram of strain data, you can clearly see the excitations between ~19 Hz and ~23 Hz. The right panel shows the amplitude spectral density for Hanford before and during the procedure, as well as for Livingston. The procedure adds extra noise in the broad peak about 20 Hz. There are no disturbances above ~30 Hz. Figure 4 of GW170608 Paper.

While we normally wouldn’t analyse data from during maintenance, we think it is safe to do so, after discarding the low-frequency data. If you are worried about the impact of including addition data in our rate estimates (there may be a bias only using time when you know there are signals), you can be reassured that it’s only a small percent of the total time, and so should introduce an error less significant than uncertainty from the calibration accuracy of the detectors.

Parameter estimation rota

Unusually for an O2 event, Aaron Zimmerman was not on shift for the Parameter Estimation rota at the time of GW170608. Instead, it was Patricia Schmidt and Eve Chase who led this analysis. Due to the engineering work in Hanford, and the low mass of the system (which means a long inspiral signal), this was one of the trickiest signals to analyse: I’d say only GW170817 was more challenging (if you ignore all the extra work we did for GW150914 as it was the first time).

Alerts and follow-up

Since this wasn’t a standard detection, it took a while to send out an alert (about thirteen and a half hours). Since this is a binary black hole merger, we wouldn’t expect that there is anything to see with telescopes, so the delay isn’t as important as it would be for a binary neutron star. Several observing teams did follow up the laert. Details can be found in the GCN Circular archive. So far, papers on follow-up have appeared from:

CALET—a gamma-ray search. This paper includes upper limits for GW151226, GW170104, GW170608, GW170814 and GW170817.
DLT40—an optical search designed for supernovae. This paper covers the whole of O2 including GW170104, GW170814, GW170817 plus GW170809 and GW170823.
Mini-GWAC—a optical survey (the precursor to GWAC). This paper covers the whole of their O2 follow-up (including GW170104).
NOvA—a search for neutrinos and cosmic rays over a wide range of energies. This paper covers all the events from O1 and O2, plus triggers from O3.
The VLA and VLITE—radio follow-up, particularly targeting a potentially interesting gamma-ray transient spotted by Fermi.

Virgo?

If you are wondering about the status of Virgo: on June 8 it was still in commissioning ahead of officially joining the run on 1 August. We have data at the time of the event. The sensitivity is of the detector is not great. We often quantify detector sensitivity by quoting the binary neutron star range (the average distance a binary neutron star could be detected). Around the time of the event, this was something like 7–8 Mpc for Virgo. During O2, the LIGO detectors have been typically in the 60–100 Mpc region; when Virgo joined O2, it had a range of around 25–30 Mpc. Unsurprisingly, Virgo didn’t detect the signal. We could have folded the data in for parameter estimation, but it was decided that it was probably not well enough understood at the time to be worthwhile.

Journal

The GW170608 Paper is the first discovery paper to be made public before journal acceptance (although the GW170814 Paper was close, and we would have probably gone ahead with the announcement anyway). I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I like that the Collaboration is seen to take their detections seriously and follow the etiquette of peer review. On the other hand, I think it is good that we can get some feedback from the broader community on papers before they’re finalised. I think it is good that the first few were peer reviewed, it gives us credibility, and it’s OK to relax now. Binary black holes are becoming routine.

This is also the first discovery paper not to go to Physical Review Letters. I don’t think there’s any deep meaning to this, the Collaboration just wanted some variety. Perhaps GW170817 sold everyone that we were astrophysicists now? Perhaps people thought that we’ve abused Physical Review Letters‘ page limits too many times, and we really do need that appendix. I was still in favour of Physical Review Letters for this paper, if they would have had us, but I approve of sharing the love. There’ll be plenty more events.

GW170814—Enter Virgo

September 27, 2017January 28, 2020 / CPLB / 2 Comments

On 14 August 2017 a gravitational wave signal (GW170814), originating from the coalescence of a binary black hole system, was observed by the global gravitational-wave observatory network of the two Advanced LIGO detectors and Advanced Virgo. That’s right, Virgo is in the game!

Very few things excite me like unlocking a new character in Smash Bros. A new gravitational wave observatory might come close.

Advanced Virgo joined O2, the second observing run of the advanced detector era, on 1 August. This was a huge achievement. It has not been an easy route commissioning the new detector—it never ceases to amaze me how sensitive these machines are. Together, Advanced Virgo (near Pisa) and the two Advanced LIGO detectors (in Livingston and Hanford in the US) would take data until the end of O2 on 25 August.

On 14 August, we found a signal. A signal that was observable in all three detectors [bonus note]. Virgo is less sensitive than the LIGO instruments, so there is no impressive plot that shows something clearly popping out, but the Virgo data do complement the LIGO observations, indicating a consistent signal in all three detectors [bonus note].

Three different ways of visualising GW170814: an SNR time series, a spectrogram and a waveform reconstruction

A cartoon of three different ways to visualise GW170814 in the three detectors. These take a bit of explaining. The top panel shows the signal-to-noise ratio the search template that matched GW170814. They peak at the time corresponding to the merger. The peaks are clear in Hanford and Livingston. The peak in Virgo is less exceptional, but it matches the expected time delay and amplitude for the signal. The middle panels show time–frequency plots. The upward sweeping chirp is visible in Hanford and Livingston, but less so in Virgo as it is less sensitive. The plot is zoomed in so that its possible to pick out the detail in Virgo, but the chirp is visible for a longer stretch of time than plotted in Livingston. The bottom panel shows whitened and band-passed strain data, together with the 90% region of the binary black hole templates used to infer the parameters of the source (the narrow dark band), and an unmodelled, coherent reconstruction of the signal (the wider light band) . The agreement between the templates and the reconstruction is a check that the gravitational waves match our expectations for binary black holes. The whitening of the data mirrors how we do the analysis, by weighting noise at different frequency by an estimate of their typical fluctuations. The signal does certainly look like the inspiral, merger and ringdown of a binary black hole. Figure 1 of the GW170814 Paper.

The signal originated from the coalescence of two black holes. GW170814 is thus added to the growing family of GW150914, LVT151012, GW151226 and GW170104.

GW170814 most closely resembles GW150914 and GW170104 (perhaps there’s something about ending with a 4). If we compare the masses of the two component black holes of the binary ( $m_1$ and $m_2$ ), and the black hole they merge to form ( $M_\mathrm{f}$ ), they are all quite similar

GW150914: $m_1 = 36.2^{+5.2}_{-3.8} M_\odot$ , $m_2 = 29.1^{+3.7}_{-4.4} M_\odot$ , $M_\mathrm{f} = 62.3^{+3.7}_{-3.1} M_\odot$ ;
GW170104: $m_1 = 31.2^{+5.4}_{-6.0} M_\odot$ , $m_2 = 19.4^{+5.3}_{-5.9} M_\odot$ , $M_\mathrm{f} = 48.7^{+5.7}_{-4.6} M_\odot$ ;
GW170814: $m_1 = 30.5^{+5.7}_{-3.0} M_\odot$ , $m_2 = 25.3^{+2.8}_{-4.2} M_\odot$ , $M_\mathrm{f} = 53.2^{+3.2}_{-2.5} M_\odot$ .

GW170814’s source is another high-mass black hole system. It’s not too surprising (now we know that these systems exist) that we observe lots of these, as more massive black holes produce louder gravitational wave signals.

GW170814 is also comparable in terms of black holes spins. Spins are more difficult to measure than masses, so we’ll just look at the effective inspiral spin $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ , a particular combination of the two component spins that influences how they inspiral together, and the spin of the final black hole $a_\mathrm{f}$

GW150914: $\chi_\mathrm{eff} = -0.06^{+0.14}_{-0.14}$ , $a_\mathrm{f} = 0.70^{+0.07}_{-0.05}$ ;
GW170104: $\chi_\mathrm{eff} = -0.12^{+0.21}_{-0.30}$ , $a_\mathrm{f} = 0.64^{+0.09}_{-0.20}$ ;
GW170814: $\chi_\mathrm{eff} = 0.06^{+0.12}_{-0.12}$ , $a_\mathrm{f} = 0.70^{+0.07}_{-0.05}$ .

There’s some spread, but the effective inspiral spins are all consistent with being close to zero. Small values occur when the individual spins are small, if the spins are misaligned with each other, or some combination of the two. I’m starting to ponder if high-mass black holes might have small spins. We don’t have enough information to tease these apart yet, but this new system is consistent with the story so far.

One of the things Virgo helps a lot with is localizing the source on the sky. Most of the information about the source location comes from the difference in arrival times at the detectors (since we know that gravitational waves should travel at the speed of light). With two detectors, the time delay constrains the source to a ring on the sky; with three detectors, time delays can narrow the possible locations down to a couple of blobs. Folding in the amplitude of the signal as measured by the different detectors adds extra information, since detectors are not equally sensitive to all points on the sky (they are most sensitive to sources over head or underneath). This can even help when you don’t observe the signal in all detectors, as you know the source must be in a direction that detector isn’t too sensitive too. GW170814 arrived at LIGO Livingston first (although it’s not a competition), then ~8 ms later at LIGO Hanford, and finally ~14 ms later at Virgo. If we only had the two LIGO detectors, we’d have an uncertainty on the source’s sky position of over 1000 square degrees, but adding in Virgo, we get this down to 60 square degrees. That’s still pretty large by astronomical standards (the full Moon is about a quarter of a square degree), but a fantastic improvement [bonus note]!

90% probability localizations for GW170814. The large banana shaped (and banana coloured, but not banana flavoured) curve uses just the two LIGO detectors, the area is 1160 square degrees. The green shows the improvement adding Virgo, the area is just 100 square degrees. Both of these are calculated using BAYESTAR, a rapid localization algorithm. The purple map is the final localization from our full parameter estimation analysis (LALInference), its area is just 60 square degrees! Whereas BAYESTAR only uses the best matching template from the search, the full parameter estimation analysis is free to explore a range of different templates. Part of Figure 3 of the GW170814 Paper.

Having additional detectors can help improve gravitational wave measurements in other ways too. One of the predictions of general relativity is that gravitational waves come in two polarizations. These polarizations describe the pattern of stretching and squashing as the wave passes, and are illustrated below.

The two polarizations of gravitational waves: plus (left) and cross (right). Here, the wave is travelling into or out of the screen. Animations adapted from those by MOBle on Wikipedia.

These two polarizations are the two tensor polarizations, but other patterns of squeezing could be present in modified theories of gravity. If we could detect any of these we would immediately know that general relativity is wrong. The two LIGO detectors are almost exactly aligned, so its difficult to get any information on other polarizations. (We tried with GW150914 and couldn’t say anything either way). With Virgo, we get a little more information. As a first illustration of what we may be able to do, we compared how well the observed pattern of radiation at the detectors matched different polarizations, to see how general relativity’s tensor polarizations compared to a signal of entirely vector or scalar radiation. The tensor polarizations are clearly preferred, so general relativity lives another day. This isn’t too surprising, as most modified theories of gravity with other polarizations predict mixtures of the different polarizations (rather than all of one). To be able to constrain all the mixtures with these short signals we really need a network of five detectors, so we’ll have to wait for KAGRA and LIGO-India to come on-line.

The siz gravitational wave polarizations

The six polarizations of a metric theory of gravity. The wave is travelling in the $z$ direction. (a) and (b) are the plus and cross tensor polarizations of general relativity. (c) and (d) are the scalar breathing and longitudinal modes, and (e) and (f) are the vector $x$ and $y$ polarizations. The tensor polarizations (in red) are transverse, the vector and longitudinal scalar mode (in green) are longitudinal. The scalar breathing mode (in blue) is an isotropic expansion and contraction, so its a bit of a mix of transverse and longitudinal. Figure 10 from (the excellent) Will (2014).

We’ll be presenting a more detailed analysis of GW170814 later, in papers summarising our O2 results, so stay tuned for more.

Title: GW170814: A three-detector observation of gravitational waves from a binary black hole coalescence
arXiv: 1709.09660 [gr-qc]
Journal: Physical Review Letters; 119(14):141101(16) [bonus note]
Data release: LIGO Open Science Center
Science summary: GW170814: A three-detector observation of gravitational waves from a binary black hole coalescence

If you’re looking for the most up-to-date results regarding GW170814, check out the O2 Catalogue Paper.

Bonus notes

Signs of paranoia

Those of you who have been following the story of gravitational waves for a while may remember the case of the Big Dog. This was a blind injection of a signal during the initial detector era. One of the things that made it an interesting signal to analyse, was that it had been injected with an inconsistent sign in Virgo compared to the two LIGO instruments (basically it was upside down). Making this type of sign error is easy, and we were a little worried that we might make this sort of mistake when analysing the real data. The Virgo calibration team were extremely careful about this, and confident in their results. Of course, we’re quite paranoid, so during the preliminary analysis of GW170814, we tried some parameter estimation runs with the data from Virgo flipped. This was clearly disfavoured compared to the right sign, so we all breathed easily.

I am starting to believe that God may be a detector commissioner. At the start of O1, we didn’t have the hardware injection systems operational, but GW150914 showed that things were working properly. Now, with a third detector on-line, GW170814 shows that the network is functioning properly. Astrophysical injections are definitely the best way to confirm things are working!

Signal hunting

Our usual way to search for binary black hole signals is compare the data to a bank of waveform templates. Since Virgo is less sensitive the the two LIGO detectors, and would only be running for a short amount of time, these main searches weren’t extended to use data from all three detectors. This seemed like a sensible plan, we were confident that this wouldn’t cause us to miss anything, and we can detect GW170814 with high significance using just data from Livingston and Hanford—the false alarm rate is estimated to be less than 1 in 27000 years (meaning that if the detectors were left running in the same state, we’d expect random noise to make something this signal-like less than once every 27000 years). However, we realised that we wanted to be able to show that Virgo had indeed seen something, and the search wasn’t set up for this.

Therefore, for the paper, we list three different checks to show that Virgo did indeed see the signal.

In a similar spirit to the main searches, we took the best fitting template (it doesn’t matter in terms of results if this is the best matching template found by the search algorithms, or the maximum likelihood waveform from parameter estimation), and compared this to a stretch of data. We then calculated the probability of seeing a peak in the signal-to-noise ratio (as shown in the top row of Figure 1) at least as large as identified for GW170814, within the time window expected for a real signal. Little blips of noise can cause peaks in the signal-to-noise ratio, for example, there’s a glitch about 50 ms after GW170814 which shows up. We find that there’s a 0.3% probability of getting a signal-to-ratio peak as large as GW170814. That’s pretty solid evidence for Virgo having seen the signal, but perhaps not overwhelming.
Binary black hole coalescences can also be detected (if the signals are short) by our searches for unmodelled signals. This was the case for GW170814. These searches were using data from all three detectors, so we can compare results with and without Virgo. Using just the two LIGO detectors, we calculate a false alarm rate of 1 per 300 years. This is good enough to claim a detection. Adding in Virgo, the false alarm rate drops to 1 per 5900 years! We see adding in Virgo improves the significance by almost a factor of 20.
Using our parameter estimation analysis, we calculate the evidence (marginal likelihood) for (i) there being a coherent signal in Livingston and Hanford, and Gaussian noise in Virgo, and (ii) there being a coherent signal in all three detectors. We then take the ratio to calculate the Bayes factor. We find that a coherent signal in all three detectors is preferred by a factor of over 1600. This is a variant of a test proposed in Veitch & Vecchio (2010); it could be fooled if the noise in Virgo is non-Gaussian (if there is a glitch), but together with the above we think that the simplest explanation for Virgo’s data is that there is a signal.

In conclusion: Virgo works. Probably.

Follow-up observations

Adding Virgo to the network greatly improves localization of the source, which is a huge advantage when searching for counterparts. For a binary black hole, as we have here, we don’t expect a counterpart (which would make finding one even more exciting). So far, no counterpart has been reported.

Arcavi et al. (2017) reported an optical search from the Las Cumbres Observatory.
Smith et al. (2019) reported an optical search, targeting strong-lensing galaxy clusters, with Gemini South and the Very Large Telescope.
Adriani et al. (2018) describe their gamma-ray observations with CALET and report upper limits for GW151226, GW170104, GW170608, GW170814 and GW170817.
Doctor et al. (2018) performed a pretty comprehensive optical search with the Dark Energy Camera.
Yang et al. (2019) describes an optical search from DLT40. This paper covers the whole of O2 including GW170104, GW170608, GW170814, GW170817 plus GW170809 and GW170823.
Klingler et al. (2019) describes X-ray follow-up with the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. This paper covers all their follow-up from O2, which includes GW170814 and GW170817.
Acero et al. (2020) describes the NOvA search for neutrinos and cosmic rays over a wide range of energies. This paper covers all the events from O1 and O2, plus triggers from O3.
Grado et al. (2020) report the GRAWITA optical search with the VLT Survey Telescope.

Announcement

This is the first observation we’ve announced before being published. The draft made public at time at announcement was accepted, pending fixing up some minor points raised by the referees (who were fantastically quick in reporting back). I guess that binary black holes are now familiar enough that we are on solid ground claiming them. I’d be interested to know if people think that it would be good if we didn’t always wait for the rubber stamp of peer review, or whether they would prefer to for detections to be externally vetted? Sharing papers before publication would mean that we get more chance for feedback from the community, which is would be good, but perhaps the Collaboration should be seen to do things properly?

One reason that the draft paper is being shared early is because of an opportunity to present to the G7 Science Ministers Meeting in Italy. I think any excuse to remind politicians that international collaboration is a good thing™ is worth taking. Although I would have liked the paper to be a little more polished [bonus advice]. The opportunity to present here only popped up recently, which is one reason why things aren’t as perfect as usual.

I also suspect that Virgo were keen to demonstrate that they had detected something prior to any Nobel Prize announcement. There’s a big difference between stories being written about LIGO and Virgo’s discoveries, and having as an afterthought that Virgo also ran in August.

The main reason, however, was to get this paper out before the announcement of GW170817. The identification of GW170817’s counterpart relied on us being able to localize the source. In that case, there wasn’t a clear signal in Virgo (the lack of a signal tells us the source wan’t in a direction wasn’t particularly sensitive to). People agreed that we really need to demonstrate that Virgo can detect gravitational waves in order to be convincing that not seeing a signal is useful information. We needed to demonstrate that Virgo does work so that our case for GW170817 was watertight and bulletproof (it’s important to be prepared).

Perfect advice

Some useful advice I was given when a PhD student was that done is better than perfect. Having something finished is often more valuable than having lots of really polished bits that don’t fit together to make a cohesive whole, and having everything absolutely perfect takes forever. This is useful to remember when writing up a thesis. I think it might apply here too: the Paper Writing Team have done a truly heroic job in getting something this advanced in little over a month. There’s always one more thing to do… [one more bonus note]

One more thing

One point I was hoping that the Paper Writing Team would clarify is our choice of prior probability distribution for the black hole spins. We don’t get a lot of information about the spins from the signal, so our choice of prior has an impact on the results.

The paper says that we assume “no restrictions on the spin orientations”, which doesn’t make much sense, as one of the two waveforms we use to analyse the signal only includes spins aligned with the orbital angular momentum! What the paper meant was that we assume a prior distribution which has an isotopic distribution of spins, and for the aligned spin (no precession) waveform, we assume a prior probability distribution on the aligned components of the spins which matches what you would have for an isotropic distribution of spins (in effect, assuming that we can only measure the aligned components of the spins, which is a good approximation).

GW170104 and me

June 1, 2017February 8, 2020 / CPLB / 6 Comments

On 4 January 2017, Advanced LIGO made a new detection of gravitational waves. The signal, which we call GW170104 [bonus note], came from the coalescence of two black holes, which inspiralled together (making that characteristic chirp) and then merged to form a single black hole.

On 4 January 2017, I was just getting up off the sofa when my phone buzzed. My new year’s resolution was to go for a walk every day, and I wanted to make use of the little available sunlight. However, my phone informed me that PyCBC (one or our search algorithms for signals from coalescing binaries) had identified an interesting event. I sat back down. I was on the rota to analyse interesting signals to infer their properties, and I was pretty sure that people would be eager to see results. They were. I didn’t leave the sofa for the rest of the day, bringing my new year’s resolution to a premature end.

Since 4 January, my time has been dominated by working on GW170104 (you might have noticed a lack of blog posts). Below I’ll share some of my war stories from life on the front line of gravitational-wave astronomy, and then go through some of the science we’ve learnt. (Feel free to skip straight to the science, recounting the story was more therapy for me).

Time–frequency plots for GW170104 as measured by Hanford (top) and Livingston (bottom). The signal is clearly visible as the upward sweeping chirp. The loudest frequency is something between E₃ and G♯₃ on a piano, and it tails off somewhere between D♯₄/E♭₄ and F♯4/G♭4. Part of Fig. 1 of the GW170104 Discovery Paper.

The story

In the second observing run, the Parameter Estimation group have divided up responsibility for analysing signals into two week shifts. For each rota shift, there is an expert and a rookie. I had assumed that the first slot of 2017 would be a quiet time. The detectors were offline over the holidays, due back online on 4 January, but the instrumentalists would probably find some extra tinkering they’d want to do, so it’d probably slip a day, and then the weather would be bad, so we’d probably not collect much data anyway… I was wrong. Very wrong. The detectors came back online on time, and there was a beautifully clean detection on day one.

My partner for the rota was Aaron Zimmerman. 4 January was his first day running parameter estimation on live signals. I think I would’ve run and hidden underneath my duvet in his case (I almost did anyway, and I lived through the madness of our first detection GW150914), but he rose to the occasion. We had first results after just a few hours, and managed to send out a preliminary sky localization to our astronomer partners on 6 January. I think this was especially impressive as there were some difficulties with the initial calibration of the data. This isn’t a problem for the detection pipelines, but does impact the parameters which we infer, particularly the sky location. The Calibration group worked quickly, and produced two updates to the calibration. We therefore had three different sets of results (one per calibration) by 6 January [bonus note]!

Producing the final results for the paper was slightly more relaxed. Aaron and I conscripted volunteers to help run all the various permutations of the analysis we wanted to double-check our results [bonus note].

Estimated waveforms from different models for GW170104

Recovered gravitational waveforms from analysis of GW170104. The broader orange band shows our estimate for the waveform without assuming a particular source (wavelet). The narrow blue bands show results if we assume it is a binary black hole (BBH) as predicted by general relativity. The two match nicely, showing no evidence for any extra features not included in the binary black hole models. Figure 4 of the GW170104 Discovery Paper.

I started working on GW170104 through my parameter estimation duties, and continued with paper writing.

Ahead of the second observing run, we decided to assemble a team to rapidly write up any interesting binary detections, and I was recruited for this (I think partially because I’m not too bad at writing and partially because I was in the office next to John Veitch, one of the chairs of the Compact Binary Coalescence group,so he can come and check that I wasn’t just goofing off eating doughnuts). We soon decided that we should write a paper about GW170104, and you can decide whether or not we succeeded in doing this rapidly…

Being on the paper writing team has given me huge respect for the teams who led the GW150914 and GW151226 papers. It is undoubtedly one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. It is extremely hard to absorb negative remarks about your work continuously for months [bonus note]—of course people don’t normally send comments about things that they like, but that doesn’t cheer you up when you’re staring at an inbox full of problems that need fixing. Getting a collaboration of 1000 people to agree on a paper is like herding cats while being a small duckling.

On of the first challenges for the paper writing team was deciding what was interesting about GW170104. It was another binary black hole coalescence—aren’t people getting bored of them by now? The signal was quieter than GW150914, so it wasn’t as remarkable. However, its properties were broadly similar. It was suggested that perhaps we should title the paper “GW170104: The most boring gravitational-wave detection”.

One potentially interesting aspect was that GW170104 probably comes from greater distance than GW150914 or GW151226 (but perhaps not LVT151012) [bonus note]. This might make it a good candidate for testing for dispersion of gravitational waves.

Dispersion occurs when different frequencies of gravitational waves travel at different speeds. A similar thing happens for light when travelling through some materials, which leads to prisms splitting light into a spectrum (and hence the creation of Pink Floyd album covers). Gravitational waves don’t suffered dispersion in general relativity, but do in some modified theories of gravity.

It should be easier to spot dispersion in signals which have travelled a greater distance, as the different frequencies have had more time to separate out. Hence, GW170104 looks pretty exciting. However, being further away also makes the signal quieter, and so there is more uncertainty in measurements and it is more difficult to tell if there is any dispersion. Dispersion is also easier to spot if you have a larger spread of frequencies, as then there can be more spreading between the highest and lowest frequencies. When you throw distance, loudness and frequency range into the mix, GW170104 doesn’t always come out on top, depending upon the particular model for dispersion: sometimes GW150914’s loudness wins, other times GW151226’s broader frequency range wins. GW170104 isn’t too special here either.

Even though GW170104 didn’t look too exciting, we started work on a paper, thinking that we would just have a short letter describing our observations. The Compact Binary Coalescence group decided that we only wanted a single paper, and we wouldn’t bother with companion papers as we did for GW150914. As we started work, and dug further into our results, we realised that actually there was rather a lot that we could say.

I guess the moral of the story is that even though you might be overshadowed by the achievements of your siblings, it doesn’t mean that you’re not awesome. There might not be one outstanding feature of GW170104, but there are lots of little things that make it interesting. We are still at the beginning of understanding the properties of binary black holes, and each new detection adds a little more to our picture.

I think GW170104 is rather neat, and I hope you do too.

As we delved into the details of our results, we realised there was actually a lot of things that we could say about GW170104, especially when considered with our previous observations. We ended up having to move some of the technical details and results to Supplemental Material. With hindsight, perhaps it would have been better to have a companion paper or two. However, I rather like how packed with science this paper is.

The paper, which Physical Review Letters have kindly accommodated, despite its length, might not be as polished a classic as the GW150914 Discovery Paper, but I think they are trying to do different things. I rarely ever refer to the GW150914 Discovery Paper for results (more commonly I use it for references), whereas I think I’ll open up the GW170104 Discovery Paper frequently to look up numbers.

Although perhaps not right away, I’d quite like some time off first. The weather’s much better now, perfect for walking…

Success! The view across Lac d’Annecy. Taken on a stroll after the Gravitational Wave Physics and Astronomy Workshop, the weekend following the publication of the paper.

The science

Advanced LIGO’s first observing run was hugely successful. Running from 12 September 2015 until 19 January 2016, there were two clear gravitational-wave detections, GW1501914 and GW151226, as well as a less certain candidate signal LVT151012. All three (assuming that they are astrophysical signals) correspond to the coalescence of binary black holes.

The second observing run started 30 November 2016. Following the first observing run’s detections, we expected more binary black hole detections. On 4 January, after we had collected almost 6 days’ worth of coincident data from the two LIGO instruments [bonus note], there was a detection.

The searches

The signal was first spotted by an online analysis. Our offline analysis of the data (using refined calibration and extra information about data quality) showed that the signal, GW170104, is highly significant. For both GstLAL and PyCBC, search algorithms which use templates to search for binary signals, the false alarm rate is estimated to be about 1 per 70,000 years.

The signal is also found in unmodelled (burst) searches, which look for generic, short gravitational wave signals. Since these are looking for more general signals than just binary coalescences, the significance associated with GW170104 isn’t as great, and coherent WaveBurst estimates a false alarm rate of 1 per 20,000 years. This is still pretty good! Reconstructions of the waveform from unmodelled analyses also match the form expected for binary black hole signals.

The search false alarm rates are the rate at which you’d expect something this signal-like (or more signal-like) due to random chance, if you data only contained noise and no signals. Using our knowledge of the search pipelines, and folding in some assumptions about the properties of binary black holes, we can calculate a probability that GW170104 is a real astrophysical signal. This comes out to be greater than $1 - (3\times10^5) = 0.99997$ .

The source

As for the previous gravitational wave detections, GW170104 comes from a binary black hole coalescence. The initial black holes were $31.2^{+8.4}_{-6.0} M_\odot$ and $19.4^{+5.3}_{-5.9} M_\odot$ (where $1 M_\odot$ is the mass of our Sun), and the final black hole was $48.7^{+5.7}_{-4.6} M_\odot$ . The quoted values are the median values and the error bars denote the central 90% probable range. The plot below shows the probability distribution for the masses; GW170104 neatly nestles in amongst the other events.

Estimated masses for the two black holes in the binary $m_1 \geq m_2$ . The two-dimensional shows the probability distribution for GW170104 as well as 50% and 90% contours for all events. The one-dimensional plot shows results using different waveform models. The dotted lines mark the edge of our 90% probability intervals. Figure 2 of the GW170104 Discovery Paper.

GW150914 was the first time that we had observed stellar-mass black holes with masses greater than around $25 M_\odot$ . GW170104 has similar masses, showing that our first detection was not a fluke, but there really is a population of black holes with masses stretching up into this range.

Black holes have two important properties: mass and spin. We have good measurements on the masses of the two initial black holes, but not the spins. The sensitivity of the form of the gravitational wave to spins can be described by two effective spin parameters, which are mass-weighted combinations of the individual spins.

The effective inspiral spin parameter $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ qualifies the impact of the spins on the rate of inspiral, and where the binary plunges together to merge. It ranges from +1, meaning both black holes are spinning as fast as possible and rotate in the same direction as the orbital motion, to −1, both black holes spinning as fast as possible but in the opposite direction to the way that the binary is orbiting. A value of 0 for $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ could mean that the black holes are not spinning, that their rotation axes are in the orbital plane (instead of aligned with the orbital angular momentum), or that one black hole is aligned with the orbital motion and the other is antialigned, so that their effects cancel out.
The effective precession spin parameter $\chi_\mathrm{p}$ qualifies the amount of precession, the way that the orbital plane and black hole spins wobble when they are not aligned. It is 0 for no precession, and 1 for maximal precession.

We can place some constraints on $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ , but can say nothing about $\chi_\mathrm{p}$ . The inferred value of the effective inspiral spin parameter is $-0.12^{+0.21}_{-0.30}$ . Therefore, we disfavour large spins aligned with the orbital angular momentum, but are consistent with small aligned spins, misaligned spins, or spins antialigned with the angular momentum. The value is similar to that for GW150914, which also had a near-zero, but slightly negative $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ of $-0.06^{+0.14}_{-0.14}$ .

Effective inspiral and precession spin parameters

Estimated effective inspiral spin parameter $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ and effective precession spin $\chi_\mathrm{p}$ parameter. The two-dimensional shows the probability distribution for GW170104 as well as 50% and 90% contours. The one-dimensional plot shows results using different waveform models, as well as the prior probability distribution. The dotted lines mark the edge of our 90% probability intervals. We learn basically nothing about precession. Part of Figure 3 of the GW170104 Discovery Paper.

Converting the information about $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ , the lack of information about $\chi_\mathrm{p}$ , and our measurement of the ratio of the two black hole masses, into probability distributions for the component spins gives the plots below [bonus note]. We disfavour (but don’t exclude) spins aligned with the orbital angular momentum, but can’t say much else.

One of the comments we had on a draft of the paper was that we weren’t making any definite statements about the spins—we would have if we could, but we can’t for GW170104, at least for the spins of the two inspiralling black holes. We can be more definite about the spin of the final black hole. If two similar mass black holes spiral together, the angular momentum from the orbit is enough to give a spin of around $0.7$ . The spins of the component black holes are less significant, and can make it a bit higher of lower. We infer a final spin of $0.64^{+0.09}_{-0.20}$ ; there is a tail of lower spin values on account of the possibility that the two component black holes could be roughly antialigned with the orbital angular momentum.

Estimated mass $M_\mathrm{f}$ and spin $a_\mathrm{f}$ for the final black hole. The two-dimensional shows the probability distribution for GW170104 as well as 50% and 90% contours. The one-dimensional plot shows results using different waveform models. The dotted lines mark the edge of our 90% probability intervals. Figure 6 of the GW170104 Supplemental Material (Figure 11 of the arXiv version).

If you’re interested in parameter describing GW170104, make sure to check out the big table in the Supplemental Material. I am a fan of tables [bonus note].

Merger rates

Adding the first 11 days of coincident data from the second observing run (including the detection of GW170104) to the results from the first observing run, we find merger rates consistent with those from the first observing run.

To calculate the merger rates, we need to assume a distribution of black hole masses, and we use two simple models. One uses a power law distribution for the primary (larger) black hole and a uniform distribution for the mass ratio; the other uses a distribution uniform in the logarithm of the masses (both primary and secondary). The true distribution should lie somewhere between the two. The power law rate density has been updated from $31^{+42}_{-21}~\mathrm{Gpc^{-3}\,yr^{-1}}$ to $32^{+33}_{-20}~\mathrm{Gpc^{-3}\,yr^{-1}}$ , and the uniform in log rate density goes from $97^{+135}_{-67}~\mathrm{Gpc^{-3}\,yr^{-1}}$ to $103^{+110}_{-63}~\mathrm{Gpc^{-3}\,yr^{-1}}$ . The median values stay about the same, but the additional data have shrunk the uncertainties a little.

Astrophysics

The discoveries from the first observing run showed that binary black holes exist and merge. The question is now how exactly they form? There are several suggested channels, and it could be there is actually a mixture of different formation mechanisms in action. It will probably require a large number of detections before we can make confident statements about the the probable formation mechanisms; GW170104 is another step towards that goal.

There are two main predicted channels of binary formation:

Isolated binary evolution, where a binary star system lives its life together with both stars collapsing to black holes at the end. To get the black holes close enough to merge, it is usually assumed that the stars go through a common envelope phase, where one star puffs up so that the gravity of its companion can steal enough material that they lie in a shared envelope. The drag from orbiting inside this then shrinks the orbit.
Dynamical evolution where black holes form in dense clusters and a binary is created by dynamical interactions between black holes (or stars) which get close enough to each other.

It’s a little artificial to separate the two, as there’s not really such a thing as an isolated binary: most stars form in clusters, even if they’re not particularly large. There are a variety of different modifications to the two main channels, such as having a third companion which drives the inner binary to merge, embedding the binary is a dense disc (as found in galactic centres), or dynamically assembling primordial black holes (formed by density perturbations in the early universe) instead of black holes formed through stellar collapse.

All the channels can predict black holes around the masses of GW170104 (which is not surprising given that they are similar to the masses of GW150914).

The updated rates are broadly consistent with most channels too. The tightening of the uncertainty of the rates means that the lower bound is now a little higher. This means some of the channels are now in tension with the inferred rates. Some of the more exotic channels—requiring a third companion (Silsbee & Tremain 2017; Antonini, Toonen & Hamers 2017) or embedded in a dense disc (Bartos et al. 2016; Stone, Metzger & Haiman 2016; Antonini & Rasio 2016)—can’t explain the full rate, but I don’t think it was ever expected that they could, they are bonus formation mechanisms. However, some of the dynamical models are also now looking like they could predict a rate that is a bit low (Rodriguez et al. 2016; Mapelli 2016; Askar et al. 2017; Park et al. 2017). Assuming that this result holds, I think this may mean that some of the model parameters need tweaking (there are more optimistic predictions for the merger rates from clusters which are still perfectly consistent), that this channel doesn’t contribute all the merging binaries, or both.

The spins might help us understand formation mechanisms. Traditionally, it has been assumed that isolated binary evolution gives spins aligned with the orbital angular momentum. The progenitor stars were probably more or less aligned with the orbital angular momentum, and tides, mass transfer and drag from the common envelope would serve to realign spins if they became misaligned. Rodriguez et al. (2016) gives a great discussion of this. Dynamically formed binaries have no correlation between spin directions, and so we would expect an isotropic distribution of spins. Hence it sounds quite simple: misaligned spins indicates dynamical formation (although we can’t tell if the black holes are primordial or stellar), and aligned spins indicates isolated binary evolution. The difficulty is the traditional assumption for isolated binary evolution potentially ignores a number of effects which could be important. When a star collapses down to a black hole, there may be a supernova explosion. There is an explosion of matter and neutrinos and these can give the black hole a kick. The kick could change the orbital plane, and so misalign the spin. Even if the kick is not that big, if it is off-centre, it could torque the black hole, causing it to rotate and so misalign the spin that way. There is some evidence that this can happen with neutron stars, as one of the pulsars in the double pulsar system shows signs of this. There could also be some instability that changes the angular momentum during the collapse of the star, possibly with different layers rotating in different ways [bonus note]. The spin of the black hole would then depend on how many layers get swallowed. This is an area of research that needs to be investigated further, and I hope the prospect of gravitational wave measurements spurs this on.

For GW170104, we know the spins are not large and aligned with the orbital angular momentum. This might argue against one variation of isolated binary evolution, chemically homogeneous evolution, where the progenitor stars are tidally locked (and so rotate aligned with the orbital angular momentum and each other). Since the stars are rapidly spinning and aligned, you would expect the final black holes to be too, if the stars completely collapse down as is usually assumed. If the stars don’t completely collapse down though, it might still be possible that GW170104 fits with this model. Aside from this, GW170104 is consistent with all the other channels.

Estimated effective inspiral spin parameter $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ for all events. To indicate how much (or little) we’ve learnt, the prior probability distribution for GW170104 is shown (the other priors are similar).All of the events have $|\chi_\mathrm{eff}| < 0.35$ at 90% probability. Figure 5 of the GW170104 Supplemental Material (Figure 10 of the arXiv version). This is one of my favourite plots [bonus note].

If we start looking at the population of events, we do start to notice something about the spins. All of the inferred values of $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ are close to zero. Only GW151226 is inconsistent with zero. These values could be explained if spins are typically misaligned (with the orbital angular momentum or each other) or if the spins are typically small (or both). We know that black holes spins can be large from observations of X-ray binaries, so it would be odd if they are small for binary black holes. Therefore, we have a tentative hint that spins are misaligned. We can’t say why the spins are misaligned, but it is intriguing. With more observations, we’ll be able to confirm if it is the case that spins are typically misaligned, and be able to start pinning down the distribution of spin magnitudes and orientations (as well as the mass distribution). It will probably take a while to be able to say anything definite though, as we’ll probably need about 100 detections.

Tests of general relativity

As well as giving us an insight into the properties of black holes, gravitational waves are the perfect tools for testing general relativity. If there are any corrections to general relativity, you’d expect them to be most noticeable under the most extreme conditions, where gravity is strong and spacetime is rapidly changing, exactly as in a binary black hole coalescence.

For GW170104 we repeated tests previously performed. Again, we found no evidence of deviations.

We added extra terms to to the waveform and constrained their potential magnitudes. The results are pretty much identical to at the end of the first observing run (consistent with zero and hence general relativity). GW170104 doesn’t add much extra information, as GW150914 typically gives the best constraints on terms that modify the post-inspiral part of the waveform (as it is louder), while GW151226 gives the best constraint on the terms which modify the inspiral (as it has the longest inspiral).

We also chopped the waveform at a frequency around that of the innermost stable orbit of the remnant black hole, which is about where the transition from inspiral to merger and ringdown occurs, to check if the low frequency and high frequency portions of the waveform give consistent estimates for the final mass and spin. They do.

We have also done something slightly new, and tested for dispersion of gravitational waves. We did something similar for GW150914 by putting a limit on the mass of the graviton. Giving the graviton mass is one way of adding dispersion, but we consider other possible forms too. In all cases, results are consistent with there being no dispersion. While we haven’t discovered anything new, we can update our gravitational wave constraint on the graviton mass of less than $7.7 \times 10^{-23}~\mathrm{eV}/c^2$ .

The search for counterparts

We don’t discuss observations made by our astronomer partners in the paper (they are not our results). A number (28 at the time of submission) of observations were made, and I expect that there will be a series of papers detailing these coming soon. So far papers have appeared from:

AGILE—hard X-ray and gamma-ray follow-up. They didn’t find any gamma-ray signals, but did identify a weak potential X-ray signal occurring about 0.46 s before GW170104. It’s a little odd to have a signal this long before the merger. The team calculate a probability for such a coincident to happen by chance, and find quite a small probability, so it might be interesting to follow this up more (see the INTEGRAL results below), but it’s probably just a coincidence (especially considering how many people did follow-up the event).
ANTARES—a search for high-energy muon neutrinos. No counterparts are identified in a ±500 s window around GW170104, or over a ±3 month period.
AstroSat-CZTI and GROWTH—a collaboration of observations across a range of wavelengths. They don’t find any hard X-ray counterparts. They do follow up on a bright optical transient ATLASaeu, suggested as a counterpart to GW170104, and conclude that this is a likely counterpart of long, soft gamma-ray burst GRB 170105A.
ATLAS and Pan-STARRS—optical follow-up. They identified a bright optical transient 23 hours after GW170104, ATLAS17aeu. This could be a counterpart to GRB 170105A. It seems unlikely that there is any mechanism that could allow for a day’s delay between the gravitational wave emission and an electromagnetic signal. However, the team calculate a small probability (few percent) of finding such a coincidence in sky position and time, so perhaps it is worth pondering. I wouldn’t put any money on it without a distance estimate for the source: assuming it’s a normal afterglow to a gamma-ray burst, you’d expect it to be further away than GW170104’s source.
Borexino—a search for low-energy neutrinos. This paper also discusses GW150914 and GW151226. In all cases, the observed rate of neutrinos is consistent with the expected background.
CALET—a gamma-ray search. This paper includes upper limits for GW151226, GW170104, GW170608, GW170814 and GW170817.
DLT40—an optical search designed for supernovae. This paper covers the whole of O2 including GW170608, GW170814, GW170817 plus GW170809 and GW170823.
Fermi (GBM and LAT)—gamma-ray follow-up. They covered an impressive fraction of the sky localization, but didn’t find anything.
INTEGRAL—gamma-ray and hard X-ray observations. No significant emission is found, which makes the event reported by AGILE unlikely to be a counterpart to GW170104, although they cannot completely rule it out.
The intermediate Palomar Transient Factory—an optical survey. While searching, they discovered iPTF17cw, a broad-line type Ic supernova which is unrelated to GW170104 but interesting as it an unusual find.
Mini-GWAC—a optical survey (the precursor to GWAC). This paper covers the whole of their O2 follow-up including GW170608.
NOvA—a search for neutrinos and cosmic rays over a wide range of energies. This paper covers all the events from O1 and O2, plus triggers from O3.
The Owens Valley Radio Observatory Long Wavelength Array—a search for prompt radio emission.
TOROS—optical follow-up. They identified no counterparts to GW170104 (although they did for GW170817).

If you are interested in what has been reported so far (no compelling counterpart candidates yet to my knowledge), there is an archive of GCN Circulars sent about GW170104.

Summary

Advanced LIGO has made its first detection of the second observing run. This is a further binary black hole coalescence. GW170104 has taught us that:

The discoveries of the first observing run were not a fluke. There really is a population of stellar mass black holes with masses above $25 M_\odot$ out there, and we can study them with gravitational waves.
Binary black hole spins may be typically misaligned or small. This is not certain yet, but it is certainly worth investigating potential mechanisms that could cause misalignment.
General relativity still works, even after considering our new tests.
If someone asks you to write a discovery paper, run. Run and do not look back.

Title: GW170104: Observation of a 50-solar-mass binary black hole coalescence at redshift 0.2
Journal: Physical Review Letters; 118(22):221101(17); 2017 (Supplemental Material)
arXiv: 1706.01812 [gr-qc]
Data release: GRavitational Wave Open Science Center
Science summary: GW170104: Observation of a 50-solar-mass binary black hole coalescence at redshift 0.2

If you’re looking for the most up-to-date results regarding GW170104, check out the O2 Catalogue Paper.

Bonus notes

Naming

Gravitational wave signals (at least the short ones, which are all that we have so far), are named by their detection date. GW170104 was discovered 2017 January 4. This isn’t too catchy, but is at least better than the ID number in our database of triggers (G268556) which is used in corresponding with our astronomer partners before we work out if the “GW” title is justified.

Previous detections have attracted nicknames, but none has stuck for GW170104. Archisman Ghosh suggested the Perihelion Event, as it was detected a few hours before the Earth reached its annual point closest to the Sun. I like this name, its rather poetic.

More recently, Alex Nitz realised that we should have called GW170104 the Enterprise-D Event, as the USS Enterprise’s registry number was NCC-1701. For those who like Star Trek: the Next Generation, I hope you have fun discussing whether GW170104 is the third or fourth (counting LVT151012) detection: “There are four detections!“

The 6 January sky map

I would like to thank the wi-fi of Chiltern Railways for their role in producing the preliminary sky map. I had arranged to visit London for the weekend (because my rota slot was likely to be quiet… ), and was frantically working on the way down to check results so they could be sent out. I’d also like to thank John Veitch for putting together the final map while I was stuck on the Underground.

Binary black hole waveforms

The parameter estimation analysis works by matching a template waveform to the data to see how well it matches. The results are therefore sensitive to your waveform model, and whether they include all the relevant bits of physics.

In the first observing run, we always used two different families of waveforms, to see what impact potential errors in the waveforms could have. The results we presented in discovery papers used two quick-to-calculate waveforms. These include the effects of the black holes’ spins in different ways

SEOBNRv2 has spins either aligned or antialigned with the orbital angular momentum. Therefore, there is no precession (wobbling of orientation, like that of a spinning top) of the system.
IMRPhenomPv2 includes an approximate description of precession, packaging up the most important information about precession into a single parameter $\chi_\mathrm{p}$ .

For GW150914, we also performed a follow-up analysis using a much more expensive waveform SEOBNRv3 which more fully includes the effect of both spins on precession. These results weren’t ready at the time of the announcement, because the waveform is laborious to run.

For GW170104, there were discussions that using a spin-aligned waveform was old hat, and that we should really only use the two precessing models. Hence, we started on the endeavour of producing SEOBNRv3 results. Fortunately, the code has been sped up a little, although it is still not quick to run. I am extremely grateful to Scott Coughlin (one of the folks behind Gravity Spy), Andrea Taracchini and Stas Babak for taking charge of producing results in time for the paper, in what was a Herculean effort.

I spent a few sleepless nights, trying to calculate if the analysis was converging quickly enough to make our target submission deadline, but it did work out in the end. Still, don’t necessarily expect we’ll do this for a all future detections.

Since the waveforms have rather scary technical names, in the paper we refer to IMRPhenomPv2 as the effective precession model and SEOBNRv3 as the full precession model.

On distance

Distance measurements for gravitational wave sources have significant uncertainties. The distance is difficult to measure as it determined from the signal amplitude, but this is also influences by the binary’s inclination. A signal could either be close and edge on or far and face on-face off.

Estimated luminosity distance $D_\mathrm{L}$ and binary inclination angle $\theta_{JN}$ . The two-dimensional shows the probability distribution for GW170104 as well as 50% and 90% contours. The one-dimensional plot shows results using different waveform models. The dotted lines mark the edge of our 90% probability intervals. Figure 4 of the GW170104 Supplemental Material (Figure 9 of the arXiv version).

The uncertainty on the distance rather awkwardly means that we can’t definitely say that GW170104 came from a further source than GW150914 or GW151226, but it’s a reasonable bet. The 90% credible intervals on the distances are 250–570 Mpc for GW150194, 250–660 Mpc for GW151226, 490–1330 Mpc for GW170104 and 500–1500 Mpc for LVT151012.

Translating from a luminosity distance to a travel time (gravitational waves do travel at the speed of light, our tests of dispersion are consistent wit that!), the GW170104 black holes merged somewhere between 1.3 and 3.0 billion years ago. This is around the time that multicellular life first evolved on Earth, and means that black holes have been colliding longer than life on Earth has been reproducing sexually.

Time line

A first draft of the paper (version 2; version 1 was a copy-and-paste of the Boxing Day Discovery Paper) was circulated to the Compact Binary Coalescence and Burst groups for comments on 4 March. This was still a rough version, and we wanted to check that we had a good outline of the paper. The main feedback was that we should include more about the astrophysical side of things. I think the final paper has a better balance, possibly erring on the side of going into too much detail on some of the more subtle points (but I think that’s better than glossing over them).

A first proper draft (version 3) was released to the entire Collaboration on 12 March in the middle of our Collaboration meeting in Pasadena. We gave an oral presentation the next day (I doubt many people had read the paper by then). Collaboration papers are usually allowed two weeks for people to comment, and we followed the same procedure here. That was not a fun time, as there was a constant trickle of comments. I remember waking up each morning and trying to guess how many emails would be in my inbox–I normally low-balled this.

I wasn’t too happy with version 3, it was still rather rough. The members of the Paper Writing Team had been furiously working on our individual tasks, but hadn’t had time to look at the whole. I was much happier with the next draft (version 4). It took some work to get this together, following up on all the comments and trying to address concerns was a challenge. It was especially difficult as we got a series of private comments, and trying to find a consensus probably made us look like the bad guys on all sides. We released version 4 on 14 April for a week of comments.

The next step was approval by the LIGO and Virgo executive bodies on 24 April. We prepared version 5 for this. By this point, I had lost track of which sentences I had written, which I had merely typed, and which were from other people completely. There were a few minor changes, mostly adding technical caveats to keep everyone happy (although they do rather complicate the flow of the text).

The paper was circulated to the Collaboration for a final week of comments on 26 April. Most comments now were about typos and presentation. However, some people will continue to make the same comment every time, regardless of how many times you explain why you are doing something different. The end was in sight!

The paper was submitted to Physical Review Letters on 9 May. I was hoping that the referees would take a while, but the reports were waiting in my inbox on Monday morning.

The referee reports weren’t too bad. Referee A had some general comments, Referee B had some good and detailed comments on the astrophysics, and Referee C gave the paper a thorough reading and had some good suggestions for clarifying the text. By this point, I have been staring at the paper so long that some outside perspective was welcome. I was hoping that we’d have a more thorough review of the testing general relativity results, but we had Bob Wald as one of our Collaboration Paper reviewers (the analysis, results and paper are all reviewed internally), so I think we had already been held to a high standard, and there wasn’t much left to say.

We put together responses to the reports. There were surprisingly few comments from the Collaboration at this point. I guess that everyone was getting tired. The paper was resubmitted and accepted on 20 May.

One of the suggestions of Referee A was to include some plots showing the results of the searches. People weren’t too keen on showing these initially, but after much badgering they were convinced, and it was decided to put these plots in the Supplemental Material which wouldn’t delay the paper as long as we got the material submitted by 26 May. This seemed like plenty of time, but it turned out to be rather frantic at the end (although not due to the new plots). The video below is an accurate representation of us trying to submit the final version.

I have an email which contains the line “Many Bothans died to bring us this information” from 1 hour and 18 minutes before the final deadline.

After this, things were looking pretty good. We had returned the proofs of the main paper (I had a fun evening double checking the author list. Yes, all of them). We were now on version 11 of the paper.

Of course, there’s always one last thing. On 31 May, the evening before publication, Salvo Vitale spotted a typo. Nothing serious, but annoying. The team at Physical Review Letters were fantastic, and took care of it immediately!

There’ll still be one more typo, there always is…

Looking back, it is clear that the principal bottle-neck in publishing the results is getting the Collaboration to converge on the paper. I’m not sure how we can overcome this… Actually, I have some ideas, but none that wouldn’t involve some form of doomsday device.

Detector status

The sensitivities of the LIGO Hanford and Livinston detectors are around the same as they were in the first observing run. After the success of the first observing run, the second observing run is the difficult follow up album. Livingston has got a little better, while Hanford is a little worse. This is because the Livingston team concentrate on improving low frequency sensitivity whereas the Hanford team focused on improving high frequency sensitivity. The Hanford team increased the laser power, but this introduces some new complications. The instruments are extremely complicated machines, and improving sensitivity is hard work.

The current plan is to have a long commissioning break after the end of this run. The low frequency tweaks from Livingston will be transferred to Hanford, and both sites will work on bringing down other sources of noise.

While the sensitivity hasn’t improved as much as we might have hoped, the calibration of the detectors has! In the first observing run, the calibration uncertainty for the first set of published results was about 10% in amplitude and 10 degrees in phase. Now, uncertainty is better than 5% in amplitude and 3 degrees in phase, and people are discussing getting this down further.

Spin evolution

As the binary inspirals, the orientation of the spins will evolve as they precess about. We always quote measurements of the spins at a point in the inspiral corresponding to a gravitational wave frequency of 20 Hz. This is most convenient for our analysis, but you can calculate the spins at other points. However, the resulting probability distributions are pretty similar at other frequencies. This is because the probability distributions are primarily determined by the combination of three things: (i) our prior assumption of a uniform distribution of spin orientations, (ii) our measurement of the effective inspiral spin, and (iii) our measurement of the mass ratio. A uniform distribution stays uniform as spins evolve, so this is unaffected, the effective inspiral spin is approximately conserved during inspiral, so this doesn’t change much, and the mass ratio is constant. The overall picture is therefore qualitatively similar at different moments during the inspiral.

Footnotes

I love footnotes. It was challenging for me to resist having any in the paper.

Gravity waves

It is possible that internal gravity waves (that is oscillations of the material making up the star, where the restoring force is gravity, not gravitational waves, which are ripples in spacetime), can transport angular momentum from the core of a star to its outer envelope, meaning that the two could rotate in different directions (Rogers, Lin & Lau 2012). I don’t think anyone has studied this yet for the progenitors of binary black holes, but it would be really cool if gravity waves set the properties of gravitational wave sources.

I really don’t want to proof read the paper which explains this though.

Colour scheme

For our plots, we use a consistent colour coding for our events. GW150914 is blue; LVT151012 is green; GW151226 is red–orange, and GW170104 is purple. The colour scheme is designed to be colour blind friendly (although adopting different line styles would perhaps be more distinguishable), and is implemented in Python in the Seaborn package as colorblind. Katerina Chatziioannou, who made most of the plots showing parameter estimation results is not a fan of the colour combinations, but put a lot of patient effort into polishing up the plots anyway.

The Boxing Day Event

June 15, 2016February 8, 2020 / CPLB / 2 Comments

Advanced LIGO’s first observing run (O1) got off to an auspicious start with the detection of GW150914 (The Event to its friends). O1 was originally planned to be three months long (September to December), but after the first discovery, there were discussions about extending the run. No major upgrades to the detectors were going to be done over the holidays anyway, so it was decided that we might as well leave them running until January.

By the time the Christmas holidays came around, I was looking forward to some time off. And, of course, lots of good food and the Doctor Who Christmas Special. The work on the first detection had been exhausting, and the Collaboration reached the collective decision that we should all take some time off [bonus note]. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

On Boxing Day, there was a sudden flurry of emails. This could only mean one thing. We had another detection! Merry GW151226 [bonus note]!

I assume someone left out milk and cookies at the observatories. A not too subtle hint from Nutsinee Kijbunchoo’s comic in the LIGO Magazine.

I will always be amazed how lucky we were detecting GW150914. This could have been easily missed if we were just a little later starting observing. If that had happened, we might not have considered extended O1, and would have missed GW151226 too!

GW151226 is another signal from a binary black hole coalescence. This wasn’t too surprising at the time, as we had estimated such signals should be pretty common. It did, however, cause a slight wrinkle in discussions of what to do in the papers about the discovery of GW150914. Should we mention that we had another potential candidate? Should we wait until we had analysed the whole of O1 fully? Should we pack it all in and have another slice of cake? In the end we decided that we shouldn’t delay the first announcement, and we definitely shouldn’t rush the analysis of the full data set. Therefore, we went ahead with the original plan of just writing about the first month of observations and giving slightly awkward answers, mumbling about still having data to analyse, when asked if we had seen anything else [bonus note]. I’m not sure how many people outside the Collaboration suspected.

The science

What have we learnt from analysing GW151226, and what have we learnt from the whole of O1? We’ve split our results into two papers.

0. The Boxing Day Discovery Paper

Title: GW151226: Observation of gravitational waves from a 22-solar-mass binary black hole
arXiv: 1606.04855 [gr-qc]
Journal: Physical Review Letters; 116(24):241103(14)
LIGO science summary: GW151226: Observation of gravitational waves from a 22 solar-mass binary black hole (by Hannah Middleton and Carl-Johan Haster)

This paper presents the discovery of GW151226 and some of the key information about it. GW151226 is not as loud as GW150914, you can’t spot it by eye in the data, but it still stands out in our search. This is a clear detection! It is another binary black hole system, but it is a lower mass system than GW150914 (hence the paper’s title—it’s a shame they couldn’t put in the error bars though).

This paper summarises the highlights of the discovery, so below, I’ll explain these without going into too much technical detail.

More details: The Boxing Day Discovery Paper summary

1. The O1 Binary Black Hole Paper

Title: Binary black hole mergers in the first Advanced LIGO observing run
arXiv: 1606.04856 [gr-qc]
Journal: Physical Review X; 6(4):041015(36)
Posterior samples: Release v1.0

This paper brings together (almost) everything we’ve learnt about binary black holes from O1. It discusses GW150915, LVT151012 and GW151226, and what we are starting to piece together about stellar-mass binary black holes from this small family of gravitational-wave events.

For the announcement of GW150914, we put together 12 companion papers to go out with the detection announcement. This paper takes on that role. It is Robin, Dr Watson, Hermione and Samwise Gamgee combined. There’s a lot of delicious science packed into this paper (searches, parameter estimation, tests of general relativity, merger rate estimation, and astrophysical implications). In my summary below, I’ll delve into what we have done and what our results mean.

The results of this paper have now largely been updated in the O2 Catalogue Paper.

More details: The O1 Binary Black Hole Paper summary

If you are interested in our science results, you can find data releases accompanying the events at the LIGO Open Science Center. These pages also include some wonderful tutorials to play with.

The Boxing Day Discovery Paper

Synopsis: Boxing Day Discovery Paper
Read this if: You are excited about the discovery of GW151226
Favourite part: We’ve done it again!

The signal

GW151226 is not as loud as GW150914, you can’t spot it by eye in the data. Therefore, this paper spends a little more time than GW150914’s Discovery Paper talking about the ingredients for our searches.

GW151226 was found by two pipelines which specifically look for compact binary coalescences: the inspiral and merger of neutron stars or black holes. We have templates for what we think these signals should look like, and we filter the data against a large bank of these to see what matches [bonus note].

For the search to work, we do need accurate templates. Figuring out what the waveforms for binary black coalescence should look like is a difficult job, and has taken almost as long as figuring out how to build the detectors!

The signal arrived at Earth 03:38:53 GMT on 26 December 2015 and was first identified by a search pipeline within 70 seconds. We didn’t have a rapid templated search online at the time of GW150914, but decided it would be a good idea afterwards. This allowed us to send out an alert to our astronomer partners so they could look for any counterparts (I don’t think any have been found [bonus note]).

The unmodelled searches (those which don’t use templates, but just coherent signals in both detectors) which first found GW150914 didn’t find GW151226. This isn’t too surprising, as they are less sensitive. You can think of the templated searches as looking for Wally (or Waldo if you’re North American), using the knowledge that he’s wearing glasses, and a red and white stripped bobble hat, but the unmodelled searches are looking for him just knowing that he’s the person that’s on on every page.

GW151226 is the second most significant event in the search for binary black holes after The Event. Its significance is not quite off the charts, but is great enough that we have a hard time calculating exactly how significant it is. Our two search pipelines give estimates of the p-value (the probability you’d see something at least this signal-like if you only had noise in your detectors) of $< 10^{-7}$ and $3.5 \times 10^{-6}$ , which are pretty good!

The source

To figure out the properties of the source, we ran our parameter-estimation analysis.

GW151226 comes from a black hole binary with masses of $14.2^{+8.3}_{-3.7} M_\odot$ and $7.5^{+2.3}_{-2.3} M_\odot$ [bonus note], where $M_\odot$ is the mass of our Sun (about 330,000 times the mass of the Earth). The error bars indicate our 90% probability ranges on the parameters. These black holes are less massive than the source of GW150914 (the more massive black hole is similar to the less massive black hole of LVT151012). However, the masses are still above what we believe is the maximum possible mass of a neutron star (around $3 M_\odot$ ). The masses are similar to those observed for black holes in X-ray binaries, so perhaps these black holes are all part of the same extended family.

A plot showing the probability distributions for the masses is shown below. It makes me happy. Since GW151226 is lower mass than GW150914, we see more of the inspiral, the portion of the signal where the two black holes are spiralling towards each other. This means that we measure the chirp mass, a particular combination of the two masses really well. It is this which gives the lovely banana shape to the distribution. Even though I don’t really like bananas, it’s satisfying to see this behaviour as this is what we have been expecting too see!

Estimated masses for the two black holes in the binary of the Boxing Day Event. The dotted lines mark the edge of our 90% probability intervals. The different coloured curves show different models: they agree which again made me happy! The two-dimensional distribution follows a curve of constant chirp mass. The sharp cut-off at the top-left is because $m_1^\mathrm{source}$ is defined to be bigger than $m_2^\mathrm{source}$ . Figure 3 of The Boxing Day Discovery Paper.

The two black holes merge to form a final black hole of $20.8^{+6.1}_{-1.7} M_\odot$ [bonus note].

If you add up the initial binary masses and compare this to the final mass, you’ll notice that something is missing. Across the entire coalescence, gravitational waves carry away $1.0^{+0.1}_{-0.2} M_\odot c^2 \simeq 1.8^{+0.2}_{-0.4} \times 10^{47}~\mathrm{J}$ of energy (where $c$ is the speed of light, which is used to convert masses to energies). This isn’t quite as impressive as the energy of GW150914, but it would take the Sun 1000 times the age of the Universe to output that much energy.

The mass measurements from GW151226 are cool, but what’re really exciting are the spin measurements. Spin, as you might guess, is a measure of how much angular momentum a black hole has. We define it to go from zero (not spinning) to one (spinning as much as is possible). A black hole is fully described by its mass and spin. The black hole masses are most important in defining what a gravitational wave looks like, but the imprint of spin is more subtle. Therefore its more difficult to get a good measurement of the spins than the masses.

For GW150915 and LVT151012, we get a little bit of information on the spins. We can conclude that the spins are probably not large, or at least they are not large and aligned with the orbit of the binary. However, we can’t say for certain that we’ve seen any evidence that the black holes are spinning. For GW151226, al least one of the black holes (although we can’t say which) has to be spinning [bonus note].

The plot below shows the probability distribution for the two spins of the binary black holes. This shows the both the magnitude of the spin and the direction that of the spin (if the tilt is zero the black hole and the binary’s orbit both go around in the same way). You can see we can’t say much about the spin of the lower mass black hole, but we have a good idea about the spin of the more massive black hole (the more extreme the mass ratio, the less important the spin of lower mass black is, making it more difficult to measure). Hopefully we’ll learn more about spins in future detections as these could tell us something about how these black holes formed.

Estimated orientation and magnitude of the two component spins. Calculated with our precessing waveform model. The distribution for the more massive black hole is on the left, and for the smaller black hole on the right. Part of Figure 4 of The Boxing Day Discovery Paper.

There’s still a lot to learn about binary black holes, and future detections will help with this. More information about what we can squeeze out of our current results are given in the O1 Binary Black Hole Paper.

The O1 Binary Black Hole Paper

Synopsis: O1 Binary Black Hole Paper
Read this if: You want to know everything we’ve learnt about binary black holes
Favourite part: The awesome table of parameters at the end

This paper contains too much science to tackle all at once, so I’ve split it up into more bite-sized pieces, roughly following the flow of the paper. First we discuss how we find signals. Then we discuss the parameters inferred from the signals. This is done assuming that general relativity is correct, so we check for any deviations from predictions in the next section. After that, we consider the rate of mergers and what we expect for the population of binary black holes from our detections. Finally, we discuss our results in the context of wider astrophysics.

Searches

Looking for signals hidden amongst the data is the first thing to do. This paper only talks about the template search for binary black holes: other search results (including the results for binaries including neutron stars) we will reported elsewhere.

The binary black hole search was previously described in the Compact Binary Coalescence Paper. We have two pipelines which look for binary black holes using templates: PyCBC and GstLAL. These look for signals which are found in both detectors (within 15 ms of each other) which match waveforms in the template bank. A few specifics of these have been tweaked since the start of O1, but these don’t really change any of the results. An overview of the details for both pipelines are given in Appendix A of the paper.

The big difference from Compact Binary Coalescence Paper is the data. We are now analysing the whole of O1, and we are using an improved version of the calibration (although this really doesn’t affect the search). Search results are given in Section II. We have one new detection: GW151226.

Search results and GW150914, GW151226 and LVT151012

Search results for PyCBC (left) and GstLAL (right). The histograms show the number of candidate events (orange squares) compare to the background. The further an orange square is to the right of the lines, the more significant it is. Different backgrounds are shown including and excluding GW150914 (top row) and GW151226 (bottom row). Figure 3 from the O1 Binary Black Hole Paper.

The plots above show the search results. Candidates are ranked by a detection statistic (a signal-to-noise ratio modified by a self-consistency check $\hat{\rho}_c$ for PyCBC, and a ratio of likelihood for the signal and noise hypotheses $\ln \mathcal{L}$ for GstLAL). A larger detection statistic means something is more signal-like and we assess the significance by comparing with the background of noise events. The further above the background curve an event is, the more significant it is. We have three events that stand out.

Number 1 is GW150914. Its significance has increased a little from the first analysis, as we can now compare it against more background data. If we accept that GW150914 is real, we should remove it from the estimation of the background: this gives us the purple background in the top row, and the black curve in the bottom row.

GW151226 is the second event. It clearly stands out when zooming in for the second row of plots. Identifying GW150914 as a signal greatly improves GW151226’s significance.

The final event is LVT151012. Its significance hasn’t changed much since the initial analysis, and is still below our threshold for detection. I’m rather fond of it, as I do love an underdog.

Parameter estimation

To figure out the properties of all three events, we do parameter estimation. This was previously described in the Parameter Estimation Paper. Our results for GW150914 and LVT151012 have been updated as we have reran with the newer calibration of the data. The new calibration has less uncertainty, which improves the precision of our results, although this is really only significant for the sky localization. Technical details of the analysis are given in Appendix B and results are discussed in Section IV. You may recognise the writing style of these sections.

The probability distributions for the masses are shown below. There is quite a spectrum, from the low mass GW151226, which is consistent with measurements of black holes in X-ray binaries, up to GW150914, which contains the biggest stellar-mass black holes ever observed.

Estimated masses for the two binary black holes for each of the events in O1. The contours mark the 50% and 90% credible regions. The grey area is excluded from our convention that $m_1^\mathrm{source} \geq m_2^\mathrm{source}$ . Part of Figure 4 of the O1 Binary Black Hole Paper.

The distributions for the lower mass GW151226 and LVT151012 follow the curves of constant chirp mass. The uncertainty is greater for LVT151012 as it is a quieter (lower SNR) signal. GW150914 looks a little different, as the merger and ringdown portions of the waveform are more important. These place tighter constraints on the total mass, explaining the shape of the distribution.

Another difference between the lower mass inspiral-dominated signals and the higher mass GW150915 can be seen in the plot below. The shows the probability distributions for the mass ratio $q = m_2^\mathrm{source}/m_1^\mathrm{source}$ and the effective spin parameter $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ , which is a mass-weighted combination of the spins aligned with the orbital angular momentum. Both play similar parts in determining the evolution of the inspiral, so there are stretching degeneracies for GW151226 and LVT151012, but this isn’t the case for GW150914.

Estimated mass ratios $q$ and effective spins $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ for each of the events in O1. The contours mark the 50% and 90% credible regions. Part of Figure 4 of the O1 Binary Black Hole Paper.

If you look carefully at the distribution of $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ for GW151226, you can see that it doesn’t extend down to zero. You cannot have a non-zero $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ unless at least one of the black holes is spinning, so this clearly shows the evidence for spin.

The final masses of the remnant black holes are shown below. Each is around 5% less than the total mass of the binary which merged to form it, with the rest radiated away as gravitational waves.

Estimated masses $M_\mathrm{f}^\mathrm{source}$ and spins $a_\mathrm{f}$ of the remnant black holes for each of the events in O1. The contours mark the 50% and 90% credible regions. Part of Figure 4 of the O1 Binary Black Hole Paper.

The plot also shows the final spins. These are much better constrained than the component spins as they are largely determined by the angular momentum of the binary as it merged. This is why the spins are all quite similar. To calculate the final spin, we use an updated formula compared to the one in the Parameter Estimation Paper. This now includes the effect of the components’ spin which isn’t aligned with the angular momentum. This doesn’t make much difference for GW150914 or LVT151012, but the change is slightly more for GW151226, as it seems to have more significant component spins.

The luminosity distance for the sources is shown below. We have large uncertainties because the luminosity distance is degenerate with the inclination. For GW151226 and LVT151012 this does result in some beautiful butterfly-like distance–inclination plots. For GW150914, the butterfly only has the face-off inclination wing (probably as consequence of the signal being louder and the location of the source on the sky). The luminosity distances for GW150914 and GW151226 are similar. This may seem odd, because GW151226 is a quieter signal, but that is because it is also lower mass (and so intrinsically quieter).

Probability distributions for the luminosity distance of the source of each of the three events in O1. Part of Figure 4 of the O1 Binary Black Hole Paper.

Sky localization is largely determined by the time delay between the two observatories. This is one of the reasons that having a third detector, like Virgo, is an awesome idea. The plot below shows the localization relative to the Earth. You can see that each event has a localization that is part of a ring which is set by the time delay. GW150914 and GW151226 were seen by Livingston first (apparently there is some gloating about this), and LVT151012 was seen by Hanford first.

Estimated sky localization relative to the Earth for each of the events in O1. The contours mark the 50% and 90% credible regions. H+ and L+ mark the locations of the two observatories. Part of Figure 5 of the O1 Binary Black Hole Paper.

Both GW151226 and LVT151012 are nearly overhead. This isn’t too surprising, as this is where the detectors are most sensitive, and so where we expect to make the most detections.

The improvement in the calibration of the data is most evident in the sky localization. For GW150914, the reduction in calibration uncertainty improves the localization by a factor of ~2–3! For LVT151012 it doesn’t make much difference because of its location and because it is a much quieter signal.

The map below shows the localization on the sky (actually where in Universe the signal came from). The maps have rearranged themselves because of the Earth’s rotation (each event was observed at a different sidereal time).

Sky localization in equatorial coordinates

Estimated sky localization (in right ascension and declination) for each of the events in O1. The contours mark the 50% and 90% credible regions. Part of Figure 5 of the O1 Binary Black Hole Paper.

We’re nowhere near localising sources to single galaxies, so we may never know exactly where these signals originated from.

Tests of general relativity

The Testing General Relativity Paper reported several results which compared GW150914 with the predictions of general relativity. Either happily or sadly, depending upon your point of view, it passed them all. In Section V of the paper, we now add GW151226 into the mix. (We don’t add LVT151012 as it’s too quiet to be much use).

A couple of the tests for GW150914 looked at the post-inspiral part of the waveform, looking at the consistency of mass and spin estimates, and trying to match the ringdown frequency. Since GW151226 is lower mass, we can’t extract any meaningful information from the post-inspiral portion of the waveform, and so it’s not worth repeating these tests.

However, the fact that GW151226 has such a lovely inspiral means that we can place some constraints on post-Newtonian parameters. We have lots and lots of cycles, so we are sensitive to any small deviations that arise during inspiral.

The plot below shows constraints on deviations for a set of different waveform parameters. A deviation of zero indicates the value in general relativity. The first four boxes (for parameters referred to as $\varphi_i$ in the Testing General Relativity Paper) are parameters that affect the inspiral. The final box on the right is for parameters which impact the merger and ringdown. The top row shows results for GW150914, these are updated results using the improved calibrated data. The second row shows results for GW151226, and the bottom row shows what happens when you combine the two.

Probability distributions for waveform parameters. The top row shows bounds from just GW150914, the second from just GW151226, and the third from combining the two. A deviation of zero is consistent with general relativity. Figure 6 from the O1 Binary Black hole Paper.

All the results are happily about zero. There were a few outliers for GW150914, but these are pulled back in by GW151226. We see that GW151226 dominates the constraints on the inspiral parameters, but GW150914 is more important for the merger–ringdown $\alpha_i$ parameters.

Again, Einstein’s theory passes the test. There is no sign of inconsistency (yet). It’s clear that adding more results greatly improves our sensitivity to these parameters, so these tests will continue put general relativity through tougher and tougher tests.

Rates

We have a small number of events, around 2.9 in total, so any estimates of how often binary black holes merge will be uncertain. Of course, just because something is tricky, it doesn’t mean we won’t give it a go! The Rates Paper discussed estimates after the first 16 days of coincident data, when we had just 1.9 events. Appendix C gives technical details and Section VI discusses results.

The whole of O1 is about 52 days’ worth of coincident data. It’s therefore about 3 times as long as the initial stretch. in that time we’ve observed about 3/2 times as many events. Therefore, you might expect that the event rate is about 1/2 of our original estimates. If you did, get yourself a cookie, as you are indeed about right!

To calculate the rates we need to assume something about the population of binary black holes. We use three fiducial distributions:

We assume that binary black holes are either like GW150914, LVT151012 or GW151226. This event-based rate is different from the previous one as it now includes an extra class for GW151226.
A flat-in-the-logarithm-of-masses distribution, which we expect gives a sensible lower bound on the rate.
A power law slope for the larger black hole of $-2.35$ , which we expect gives a sensible upper bound on the rate.

We find that the rates are 1. $54^{+111}_{-40}~\mathrm{Gpc^{-3}\,yr^{-1}}$ , 2. $30^{+46}_{-21}~\mathrm{Gpc^{-3}\,yr^{-1}}$ , and 3. $97^{+149}_{-68}~\mathrm{Gpc^{-3}\,yr^{-1}}$ . As expected, the first rate is nestled between the other two.

Despite the rates being lower, there’s still a good chance we could see 10 events by the end of O2 (although that will depend on the sensitivity of the detectors).

A new results that is included in with the rates, is a simple fit for the distribution of black hole masses [bonus note]. The method is described in Appendix D. It’s just a repeated application of Bayes’ theorem to go from the masses we measured from the detected sources, to the distribution of masses of the entire population.

We assume that the mass of the larger black hole is distributed according to a power law with index $\alpha$ , and that the less massive black hole has a mass uniformly distributed in mass ratio, down to a minimum black hole mass of $5 M_\odot$ . The cut-off, is the edge of a speculated mass gap between neutron stars and black holes.

We find that $\alpha = 2.5^{+1.5}_{-1.6}$ . This has significant uncertainty, so we can’t say too much yet. This is a slightly steeper slope than used for the power-law rate (although entirely consistent with it), which would nudge the rates a little lower. The slope does fit in with fits to the distribution of masses in X-ray binaries. I’m excited to see how O2 will change our understanding of the distribution.

Astrophysical implications

With the announcement of GW150914, the Astrophysics Paper reviewed predictions for binary black holes in light of the discovery. The high masses of GW150914 indicated a low metallicity environment, perhaps no more than half of solar metallicity. However, we couldn’t tell if GW150914 came from isolated binary evolution (two stars which have lived and died together) or a dynamical interaction (probably in a globular cluster).

Since then, various studies have been performed looking at both binary evolution (Eldridge & Stanway 2016; Belczynski et al. 2016; de Mink & Mandel 2016; Hartwig et al. 2016; Inayoshi et al. 2016; Lipunov et al. 2016) and dynamical interactions (O’Leary, Meiron & Kocsis 2016; Mapelli 2016; Rodriguez et al. 2016), even considering binaries around supermassive black holes (Bartos et al. 2016; Stone, Metzger & Haiman 2016). We don’t have enough information to tell the two pathways apart. GW151226 gives some new information. Everything is reviewed briefly in Section VII.

GW151226 and LVT151012 are lower mass systems, and so don’t need to come from as low a metallicity environment as GW150914 (although they still could). Both are also consistent with either binary evolution or dynamical interactions. However, the low masses of GW151226 mean that it probably does not come from one particular binary formation scenario, chemically homogeneous evolution, and it is less likely to come from dynamical interactions.

Building up a population of sources, and getting better measurements of spins and mass ratios will help tease formation mechanisms apart. That will take a while, but perhaps it will be helped if we can do multi-band gravitational-wave astronomy with eLISA.

This section also updates predictions from the Stochastic Paper for the gravitational-wave background from binary black holes. There’s a small change from an energy density of $\Omega_\mathrm{GW} = 1.1^{+2.7}_{-0.9} \times 10^{-9}$ at a frequency of 25 Hz to $\Omega_\mathrm{GW} = 1.2^{+1.9}_{-0.9} \times 10^{-9}$ . This might be measurable after a few years at design sensitivity.

Conclusion

We are living in the future. We may not have hoverboards, but the era of gravitational-wave astronomy is here. Not in 20 years, not in the next decade, not in five more years, now. LIGO has not just opened a new window, it’s smashed the window and jumped through it just before the explosion blasts the side off the building. It’s so exciting that I can’t even get my metaphors straight. The introductory paragraphs of papers on gravitational-wave astronomy will never be the same again.

Although we were lucky to discover GW150914, it wasn’t just a fluke. Binary black coalescences aren’t that rare and we should be detecting more. Lots more. You know that scene in a movie where the heroes have defeated a wave of enemies and then the camera pans back to show the approaching hoard that stretches to the horizon? That’s where we are now. O2 is coming. The second observing run, will start later this year, and we expect we’ll be adding many entries to our list of binary black holes.

We’re just getting started with LIGO and Virgo. There’ll be lots more science to come.

If you made it this far, you deserve a biscuit. A fancy one too, not just a digestive.

Or, if you’re hungry for more, here are some blogs from my LIGO colleagues

Daniel Williams (a PhD student at University of Glasgow)
Matt Pitkin (who is hunting for continuous gravitational waves)
Shane Larson (who is also investigating mutli-band gravitational-wave astronomy)
Amber Sturver (who works at the Livingston Observatory)

My group at Birmingham also made some short reaction videos (I’m too embarrassed to watch mine).

Bonus notes

Christmas cease-fire

In the run-up to the holidays, there were lots of emails that contained phrases like “will have to wait until people get back from holidays” or “can’t reply as the group are travelling and have family commitments”. No-one ever said that they were taking a holiday, but just that it was happening in general, so we’d all have to wait for a couple of weeks. No-one ever argued with this, because, of course, while you were waiting for other people to do things, there was nothing you could do, and so you might as well take some time off. And you had been working really hard, so perhaps an evening off and an extra slice of cake was deserved…

Rather guiltily, I must confess to ignoring the first few emails on Boxing Day. (Although I saw them, I didn’t read them for reasons of plausible deniability). I thought it was important that my laptop could have Boxing Day off. Thankfully, others in the Collaboration were more energetic and got things going straight-away.

Naming

Gravitational-wave candidates (or at least the short ones from merging binary black holes which we have detected so far), start off life named by a number in our database. This event started life out as G211117. After checks and further analysis, to make sure we can’t identify any environmental effects which could have caused the detector to misbehave, candidates are renamed. Those which are significant enough to be claimed as a detection get the Gravitational Wave (GW) prefix. Those we are less certain of get the LIGO–Virgo Trigger (LVT) prefix. The rest of the name is the date in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The new detection is GW151226.

Informally though, it is the Boxing Day Event. I’m rather impressed that this stuck as the Collaboration is largely US based: it was still Christmas Day in the US when the detection was made, and Americans don’t celebrate Boxing Day anyway.

Matched filtering

The compact binary coalescence search uses matched filtering to hunt for gravitational waves. This is a well established technique in signal processing. You have a template signal, and you see how this correlates with the data. We use the detectors’ sensitivity to filter the data, so that we give more weight to bits which match where we are sensitive, and little weight to matches where we have little sensitivity.

I imagine matched filtering as similar to how I identify a piece of music: I hear a pattern of notes and try to compare to things I know. Dum-dum-dum-daah? Beethoven’s Fifth.

Filtering against a large number of templates takes a lot of computational power, so we need to be cunning as to which templates we include. We don’t want to miss anything, so we need enough templates to cover all possibilities, but signals from similar systems can look almost identical, so we just need one representative template included in the bank. Think of trying to pick out Under Pressure, you could easily do this with a template for Ice Ice Baby, and you don’t need both Mr Brightside and Ode to Joy.

It doesn’t matter if the search doesn’t pick out a template that perfectly fits the properties of the source, as this is what parameter estimation is for.

The figure below shows how effective matched filtering can be.

The top row shows the data from the two interferometers. It’s been cleaned up a little bit for the plot (to keep the experimentalists happy), but you can see that the noise in the detectors is seemingly much bigger than the best match template (shown in black, the same for both detectors).
The second row shows the accumulation of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). If you correlate the data with the template, you see that it matches the template, and keeps matching the template. This is the important part, although, at any moment it looks like there’s just random wibbles in the detector, when you compare with a template you find that there is actually a signal which evolves in a particular way. The SNR increases until the signal stops (because the black holes have merged). It is a little lower in the Livinston detector as this was slightly less sensitive around the time of the Boxing Day Event.
The third row shows how much total SNR you would get if you moved the best match template around in time. There’s a clear peak. This is trying to show that the way the signal changes is important, and you wouldn’t get a high SNR when the signal isn’t there (you would normally expect it to be about 1).
The final row shows the amount of energy at a particular frequency at a particular time. Compact binary coalescences have a characteristic chirp, so you would expect a sweep from lower frequencies up to higher frequencies. You can just about make it out in these plots, but it’s not obvious as for GW150914. This again shows the value of matched filtering, but it also shows that there’s no other weird glitchy stuff going on in the detectors at the time.

The effectiveness of matched filtering for GW151226

Observation of The Boxing Day Event in LIGO Hanford and LIGO Livingston. The top row shows filtered data and best match template. The second row shows how this template accumulates signal-to-noise ratio. The third row shows signal-to-noise ratio of this template at different end times. The fourth row shows a spectrogram of the data. Figure 1 of the Boxing Day Discovery Paper.

Electromagnetic and neutrino follow-up

Reports by electromagnetic astronomers on their searches for counterparts so far are:

CALET—an X-ray and gamma-ray search. This team also have a paper on their analysis and upper limits for GW151226, GW170104, GW170608, GW170814 and GW170817.
Dark Energy Camera—an optical search.
Fermi GBM & LAT—an X-ray and gamma-ray search for counterparts to GW151226 and LVT151012.
Jansky Very Large Array—a radio search for counterparts to GW150914 and GW151226. A separate effort later followed up the most probable 100 square degrees later, as a test of a new on-the-fly mosaicing technique.
J-GEM—an optical and near-infrared survey.
Liverpool Telescope—an optical and near-infrared search for counterparts to GW150914 and GW151226.
MAXI—an X-ray monitor on the International Space Station.
Pan-STARRS & PESSTO—an optical search which didn’t find a counterpart, but did find an unusual Type Ibn supernova.
Swift—an X-ray search.
GRAWITA—an optical search.

Reports by neutrino astronomers are:

ANTARES and IceCube—a search for high-energy neutrinos (above 100 GeV) coincident with LVT151012 or GW151226.
KamLAND—a search for neutrinos (1.8 MeV to 111 MeV) coincident with GW150914, LVT151012 or GW151226.
Pierre Auger Observatory—a search for ultra high-energy (above 100 PeV) neutrinos coincident with GW150914, LVT151012 or GW151226.
Super-Kamiokande—a search for neutrinos (of a wide range of energies, from 3.5 MeV to 100 PeV) coincident with GW150914 or GW151226.
Borexino—a search for low-energy (250 keV to 15 MeV) neutrinos coincident with GW150914, GW151226 and GW170104.
NOvA—a search for neutrinos and cosmic rays (or a wide range of energies, from 10 MeV to over a GeV) coincident with all events from O1 and O2, plus triggers from O3.

No counterparts have been claimed, which isn’t surprising for a binary black hole coalescence.

Rounding

In various places, the mass of the smaller black hole is given as $8 M_\odot$ . The median should really round to $7 M_\odot$ as to three significant figures it is $7.48 M_\odot$ . This really confused everyone though, as with rounding you’d have a binary with components of masses $14 M_\odot$ and $7 M_\odot$ and total mass $22 M_\odot$ . Rounding is a pain! Fortunately, $8 M_\odot$ lies well within the uncertainty: the 90% range is $5.2\text{--}9.8 M_\odot$ .

Black holes are massive

I tried to find a way to convert the mass of the final black hole into every day scales. Unfortunately, the thing is so unbelievably massive, it just doesn’t work: it’s no use relating it to elephants or bowling balls. However, I did have some fun looking up numbers. Currently, it costs about £2 to buy a 180 gram bar of Cadbury’s Bourneville. Therefore, to buy an equivalent amount of dark chocolate would require everyone on Earth to save up for about 600 millions times the age of the Universe (assuming GDP stays constant). By this point, I’m sure the chocolate will be past its best, so it’s almost certainly a big waste of time.

Maximum minimum spin

One of the statistics people really seemed to latch on to for the Boxing Day Event was that at least one of the binary black holes had to have a spin of greater than 0.2 with 99% probability. It’s a nice number for showing that we have a preference for some spin, but it can be a bit tricky to interpret. If we knew absolutely nothing about the spins, then we would have a uniform distribution on both spins. There’d be a 10% chance that the spin of the more massive black hole is less than 0.1, and a 10% chance that the spin of the other black hole is less than 0.1. Hence, there’s a 99% probability that there is at least one black hole with spin greater than 0.1, even though we have no evidence that the black holes are spinning (or not). Really, you need to look at the full probability distributions for the spins, and not just the summary statistics, to get an idea of what’s going on.

Just one more thing…

The fit for the black hole mass distribution was the last thing to go in the paper. It was a bit frantic to get everything reviewed in time. In the last week, there were a couple of loud exclamations from the office next to mine, occupied by John Veitch, who as one of the CBC chairs has to keep everything and everyone organised. (I’m not quite sure how John still has so much of his hair). It seems that we just can’t stop doing science. There is a more sophisticated calculation in the works, but the foot was put down that we’re not trying to cram any more into the current papers.

GW150914—The papers

February 23, 2016March 3, 2021 / CPLB / 3 Comments

In 2015 I made a resolution to write a blog post for each paper I had published. In 2016 I’ll have to break this because there are too many to keep up with. A suite of papers were prepared to accompany the announcement of the detection of GW150914 [bonus note], and in this post I’ll give an overview of these.

The papers

As well as the Discovery Paper published in Physical Review Letters [bonus note], there are 12 companion papers. All the papers are listed below in order of arXiv posting. My favourite is the Parameter Estimation Paper.

Subsequently, we have produced additional papers on GW150914, describing work that wasn’t finished in time for the announcement. The most up-to-date results are currently given in the O2 Catalogue Paper.

0. The Discovery Paper

Title: Observation of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger
arXiv: 1602.03837 [gr-qc]
Journal: Physical Review Letters; 116(6):061102(16); 2016
LIGO science summary: Observation of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger

This is the central paper that announces the observation of gravitational waves. There are three discoveries which are describe here: (i) the direct detection of gravitational waves, (ii) the existence of stellar-mass binary black holes, and (iii) that the black holes and gravitational waves are consistent with Einstein’s theory of general relativity. That’s not too shabby in under 11 pages (if you exclude the author list). Coming 100 years after Einstein first published his prediction of gravitational waves and Schwarzschild published his black hole solution, this is the perfect birthday present.

More details: The Discovery Paper summary

1. The Detector Paper

Title: GW150914: The Advanced LIGO detectors in the era of first discoveries
arXiv: 1602.03838 [gr-qc]
Journal: Physical Review Letters; 116(13):131103(12); 2016
LIGO science summary: GW150914: The Advanced LIGO detectors in the era of the first discoveries

This paper gives a short summary of how the LIGO detectors work and their configuration in O1 (see the Advanced LIGO paper for the full design). Giant lasers and tiny measurements, the experimentalists do some cool things (even if their paper titles are a little cheesy and they seem to be allergic to error bars).

More details: The Detector Paper summary

2. The Compact Binary Coalescence Paper

Title: GW150914: First results from the search for binary black hole coalescence with Advanced LIGO
arXiv: 1602.03839 [gr-qc]
Journal: Physical Review D; 93(12):122003(21); 2016
LIGO science summary: How we searched for merging black holes and found GW150914

Here we explain how we search for binary black holes and calculate the significance of potential candidates. This is the evidence to back up (i) in the Discovery Paper. We can potentially detect binary black holes in two ways: with searches that use templates, or with searches that look for coherent signals in both detectors without assuming a particular shape. The first type is also used for neutron star–black hole or binary neutron star coalescences, collectively known as compact binary coalescences. This type of search is described here, while the other type is described in the Burst Paper.

This paper describes the compact binary coalescence search pipelines and their results. As well as GW150914 there is also another interesting event, LVT151012. This isn’t significant enough to be claimed as a detection, but it is worth considering in more detail.

More details: The Compact Binary Coalescence Paper summary

3. The Parameter Estimation Paper

Title: Properties of the binary black hole merger GW150914
arXiv: 1602.03840 [gr-qc]
Journal: Physical Review Letters; 116(24):241102(19); 2016
LIGO science summary: The first measurement of a black hole merger and what it means

If you’re interested in the properties of the binary black hole system, then this is the paper for you! Here we explain how we do parameter estimation and how it is possible to extract masses, spins, location, etc. from the signal. These are the results I’ve been most heavily involved with, so I hope lots of people will find them useful! This is the paper to cite if you’re using our best masses, spins, distance or sky maps. The masses we infer are so large we conclude that the system must contain black holes, which is discovery (ii) reported in the Discovery Paper.

More details: The Parameter Estimation Paper summary

4. The Testing General Relativity Paper

Title: Tests of general relativity with GW150914
arXiv: 1602.03841 [gr-qc]
Journal: Physical Review Letters; 116(22):221101(19); 2016
LIGO science summary: Was Einstein right about strong gravity?

The observation of GW150914 provides a new insight into the behaviour of gravity. We have never before probed such strong gravitational fields or such highly dynamical spacetime. These are the sorts of places you might imagine that we could start to see deviations from the predictions of general relativity. Aside from checking that we understand gravity, we also need to check to see if there is any evidence that our estimated parameters for the system could be off. We find that everything is consistent with general relativity, which is good for Einstein and is also discovery (iii) in the Discovery Paper.

More details: The Testing General Relativity Paper summary

5. The Rates Paper

Title: The rate of binary black hole mergers inferred from Advanced LIGO observations surrounding GW150914
arXiv: 1602.03842 [astro-ph.HE]; 1606.03939 [astro-ph.HE]
Journal: Astrophysical Journal Letters; 833(1):L1(8); 2016; Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series; 227(2):14(11); 2016
LIGO science summary: The first measurement of a black hole merger and what it means

Given that we’ve spotted one binary black hole (plus maybe another with LVT151012), how many more are out there and how many more should we expect to find? We answer this here, although there’s a large uncertainty on the estimates since we don’t know (yet) the distribution of masses for binary black holes.

More details: The Rates Paper summary

6. The Burst Paper

Title: Observing gravitational-wave transient GW150914 with minimal assumptions
arXiv: 1602.03843 [gr-qc]
Journal: Physical Review D; 93(12):122004(20); 2016

What can you learn about GW150914 without having to make the assumptions that it corresponds to gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger (as predicted by general relativity)? This paper describes and presents the results of the burst searches. Since the pipeline which first found GW150914 was a burst pipeline, it seems a little unfair that this paper comes after the Compact Binary Coalescence Paper, but I guess the idea is to first present results assuming it is a binary (since these are tightest) and then see how things change if you relax the assumptions. The waveforms reconstructed by the burst models do match the templates for a binary black hole coalescence.

More details: The Burst Paper summary

7. The Detector Characterisation Paper

Title: Characterization of transient noise in Advanced LIGO relevant to gravitational wave signal GW150914
arXiv: 1602.03844 [gr-qc]
Journal: Classical & Quantum Gravity; 33(13):134001(34); 2016
LIGO science summary: How do we know GW150914 was real? Vetting a Gravitational Wave Signal of Astrophysical Origin
CQG+ post: How do we know LIGO detected gravitational waves? [featuring awesome cartoons]

Could GW150914 be caused by something other than a gravitational wave: are there sources of noise that could mimic a signal, or ways that the detector could be disturbed to produce something that would be mistaken for a detection? This paper looks at these problems and details all the ways we monitor the detectors and the external environment. We can find nothing that can explain GW150914 (and LVT151012) other than either a gravitational wave or a really lucky random noise fluctuation. I think this paper is extremely important to our ability to claim a detection and I’m surprised it’s not number 2 in the list of companion papers. If you want to know how thorough the Collaboration is in monitoring the detectors, this is the paper for you.

More details: The Detector Characterisation Paper summary

8. The Calibration Paper

Title: Calibration of the Advanced LIGO detectors for the discovery of the binary black-hole merger GW150914
arXiv: 1602.03845 [gr-qc]
Journal: Physical Review D; 95(6):062003(16); 2017
LIGO science summary: Calibration of the Advanced LIGO detectors for the discovery of the binary black-hole merger GW150914

Completing the triumvirate of instrumental papers with the Detector Paper and the Detector Characterisation Paper, this paper describes how the LIGO detectors are calibrated. There are some cunning control mechanisms involved in operating the interferometers, and we need to understand these to quantify how they effect what we measure. Building a better model for calibration uncertainties is high on the to-do list for improving parameter estimation, so this is an interesting area to watch for me.

More details: The Calibration Paper summary

9. The Astrophysics Paper

Title: Astrophysical implications of the binary black-hole merger GW150914
arXiv: 1602.03846 [astro-ph.HE]
Journal: Astrophysical Journal Letters; 818(2):L22(15); 2016
LIGO science summary: The first measurement of a black hole merger and what it means

Having estimated source parameters and rate of mergers, what can we say about astrophysics? This paper reviews results related to binary black holes to put our findings in context and also makes statements about what we could hope to learn in the future.

More details: The Astrophysics Paper summary

10. The Stochastic Paper

Title: GW150914: Implications for the stochastic gravitational wave background from binary black holes
arXiv: 1602.03847 [gr-qc]
Journal: Physical Review Letters; 116(13):131102(12); 2016
LIGO science summary: Background of gravitational waves expected from binary black hole events like GW150914

For every loud signal we detect, we expect that there will be many more quiet ones. This paper considers how many quiet binary black hole signals could add up to form a stochastic background. We may be able to see this background as the detectors are upgraded, so we should start thinking about what to do to identify it and learn from it.

More details: The Stochastic Paper summary

11. The Neutrino Paper

Title: High-energy neutrino follow-up search of gravitational wave event GW150914 with ANTARES and IceCube
arXiv: 1602.05411 [astro-ph.HE]
Journal: Physical Review D; 93(12):122010(15); 2016
LIGO science summary: Search for neutrinos from merging black holes

We are interested so see if there’s any other signal that coincides with a gravitational wave signal. We wouldn’t expect something to accompany a black hole merger, but it’s good to check. This paper describes the search for high-energy neutrinos. We didn’t find anything, but perhaps we will in the future (perhaps for a binary neutron star merger).

More details: The Neutrino Paper summary

12. The Electromagnetic Follow-up Paper

Title: Localization and broadband follow-up of the gravitational-wave transient GW150914
arXiv: 1602.08492 [astro-ph.HE]; 1604.07864 [astro-ph.HE]
Journal: Astrophysical Journal Letters; 826(1):L13(8); 2016; Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series; 225(1):8(15); 2016

As well as looking for coincident neutrinos, we are also interested in electromagnetic observations (gamma-ray, X-ray, optical, infra-red or radio). We had a large group of observers interesting in following up on gravitational wave triggers, and 25 teams have reported observations. This companion describes the procedure for follow-up observations and discusses sky localisation.

This work split into a main article and a supplement which goes into more technical details.

More details: The Electromagnetic Follow-up Paper summary

BEST. ARXIV. EVER!

We have 1602.03837 to 1602.03847 on #GravitationalWaves. A couple more to come. pic.twitter.com/HRdwcm60Mr

— Christopher Berry (@cplberry) February 12, 2016

The Discovery Paper

Synopsis: Discovery Paper
Read this if: You want an overview of The Event
Favourite part: The entire conclusion:

The LIGO detectors have observed gravitational waves from the merger of two stellar-mass black holes. The detected waveform matches the predictions of general relativity for the inspiral and merger of a pair of black holes and the ringdown of the resulting single black hole. These observations demonstrate the existence of binary stellar-mass black hole systems. This is the first direct detection of gravitational waves and the first observation of a binary black hole merger.

The Discovery Paper gives the key science results and is remarkably well written. It seems a shame to summarise it: you should read it for yourself! (It’s free).

The Detector Paper

Synopsis: Detector Paper
Read this if: You want a brief description of the detector configuration for O1
Favourite part: It’s short!

The LIGO detectors contain lots of cool pieces of physics. This paper briefly outlines them all: the mirror suspensions, the vacuum (the LIGO arms are the largest vacuum envelopes in the world and some of the cleanest), the mirror coatings, the laser optics and the control systems. A full description is given in the Advanced LIGO paper, but the specs there are for design sensitivity (it is also heavy reading). The main difference between the current configuration and that for design sensitivity is the laser power. Currently the circulating power in the arms is $100~\mathrm{kW}$ , the plan is to go up to $750~\mathrm{kW}$ . This will reduce shot noise, but raises all sorts of control issues, such as how to avoid parametric instabilities.

The noise amplitude spectral density. The curves for the current observations are shown in red (dark for Hanford, light for Livingston). This is around a factor 3 better than in the final run of initial LIGO (green), but still a factor of 3 off design sensitivity (dark blue). The light blue curve shows the impact of potential future upgrades. The improvement at low frequencies is especially useful for high-mass systems like GW150914. Part of Fig. 1 of the Detector Paper.

The Compact Binary Coalescence Paper

Synopsis: Compact Binary Coalescence Paper
Read this if: You are interested in detection significance or in LVT151012
Favourite part: We might have found a second binary black hole merger

There are two compact binary coalescence searches that look for binary black holes: PyCBC and GstLAL. Both match templates to the data from the detectors to look for anything binary like, they then calculate the probability that such a match would happen by chance due to a random noise fluctuation (the false alarm probability or p-value [unhappy bonus note]). The false alarm probability isn’t the probability that there is a gravitational wave, but gives a good indication of how surprised we should be to find this signal if there wasn’t one. Here we report the results of both pipelines on the first 38.6 days of data (about 17 days where both detectors were working at the same time).

Both searches use the same set of templates to look for binary black holes [bonus note]. They look for where the same template matches the data from both detectors within a time interval consistent with the travel time between the two. However, the two searches rank candidate events and calculate false alarm probabilities using different methods. Basically, both searches use a detection statistic (the quantity used to rank candidates: higher means less likely to be noise), that is based on the signal-to-noise ratio (how loud the signal is) and a goodness-of-fit statistic. They assess the significance of a particular value of this detection statistic by calculating how frequently this would be obtained if there was just random noise (this is done by comparing data from the two detectors when there is not a coincident trigger in both). Consistency between the two searches gives us greater confidence in the results.

PyCBC’s detection statistic is a reweighted signal-to-noise ratio $\hat{\rho}_c$ which takes into account the consistency of the signal in different frequency bands. You can get a large signal-to-noise ratio from a loud glitch, but this doesn’t match the template across a range of frequencies, which is why this test is useful. The consistency is quantified by a reduced chi-squared statistic. This is used, depending on its value, to weight the signal-to-noise ratio. When it is large (indicating inconsistency across frequency bins), the reweighted signal-to-noise ratio becomes smaller.

To calculate the background, PyCBC uses time slides. Data from the two detectors are shifted in time so that any coincidences can’t be due to a real gravitational wave. Seeing how often you get something signal-like then tells you how often you’d expect this to happen due to random noise.

GstLAL calculates the signal-to-noise ratio and a residual after subtracting the template. As a detection statistic, it uses a likelihood ratio $\mathcal{L}$ : the probability of finding the particular values of the signal-to-noise ratio and residual in both detectors for signals (assuming signal sources are uniformly distributed isotropically in space), divided by the probability of finding them for noise.

The background from GstLAL is worked out by looking at the likelihood ratio fro triggers that only appear in one detector. Since there’s no coincident signal in the other, these triggers can’t correspond to a real gravitational wave. Looking at their distribution tells you how frequently such things happen due to noise, and hence how probable it is for both detectors to see something signal-like at the same time.

The results of the searches are shown in the figure below.

Search results for PyCBC (left) and GstLAL (right). The histograms show the number of candidate events (orange squares) compare to the background. The black line includes GW150914 in the background estimate, the purple removes it (assuming that it is a signal). The further an orange square is above the lines, the more significant it is. Particle physicists like to quote significance in terms of $\sigma$ and for some reason we’ve copied them. The second most significant event (around $2\sigma$ ) is LVT151012. Fig. 7 from the Compact Binary Coalescence Paper.

GW150914 is the most significant event in both searches (it is the most significant PyCBC event even considering just single-detector triggers). They both find GW150914 with the same template values. The significance is literally off the charts. PyCBC can only calculate an upper bound on the false alarm probability of $< 2 \times 10^{-7}$ . GstLAL calculates a false alarm probability of $1.4 \times 10^{-11}$ , but this is reaching the level that we have to worry about the accuracy of assumptions that go into this (that the distribution of noise triggers in uniform across templates—if this is not the case, the false alarm probability could be about $10^3$ times larger). Therefore, for our overall result, we stick to the upper bound, which is consistent with both searches. The false alarm probability is so tiny, I don’t think anyone doubts this signal is real.

There is a second event that pops up above the background. This is LVT151012. It is found by both searches. Its signal-to-noise ratio is $9.6$ , compared with GW150914’s $24$ , so it is quiet. The false alarm probability from PyCBC is $0.02$ , and from GstLAL is $0.05$ , consistent with what we would expect for such a signal. LVT151012 does not reach the standards we would like to claim a detection, but it is still interesting.

Running parameter estimation on LVT151012, as we did for GW150914, gives beautiful results. If it is astrophysical in origin, it is another binary black hole merger. The component masses are lower, $m_1^\mathrm{source} = 23^{+18}_{-5} M_\odot$ and $m_2^\mathrm{source} 13^{+4}_{-5} M_\odot$ (the asymmetric uncertainties come from imposing $m_1^\mathrm{source} \geq m_2^\mathrm{source}$ ); the chirp mass is $\mathcal{M} = 15^{+1}_{-1} M_\odot$ . The effective spin, as for GW150914, is close to zero $\chi_\mathrm{eff} = 0.0^{+0.3}_{-0.2}$ . The luminosity distance is $D_\mathrm{L} = 1100^{+500}_{-500}~\mathrm{Mpc}$ , meaning it is about twice as far away as GW150914’s source. I hope we’ll write more about this event in the future; there are some more details in the Rates Paper.

Is it random noise or is it a gravitational wave? LVT151012 remains a mystery. This candidate event is discussed in the Compact Binary Coalescence Paper (where it is found), the Rates Paper (which calculates the probability that it is extraterrestrial in origin), and the Detector Characterisation Paper (where known environmental sources fail to explain it). SPOILERS

The Parameter Estimation Paper

Synopsis: Parameter Estimation Paper
Read this if: You want to know the properties of GW150914’s source
Favourite part: We inferred the properties of black holes using measurements of spacetime itself!

The gravitational wave signal encodes all sorts of information about its source. Here, we explain how we extract this information to produce probability distributions for the source parameters. I wrote about the properties of GW150914 in my previous post, so here I’ll go into a few more technical details.

To measure parameters we match a template waveform to the data from the two instruments. The better the fit, the more likely it is that the source had the particular parameters which were used to generate that particular template. Changing different parameters has different effects on the waveform (for example, changing the distance changes the amplitude, while changing the relative arrival times changes the sky position), so we often talk about different pieces of the waveform containing different pieces of information, even though we fit the whole lot at once.

The shape of the gravitational wave encodes the properties of the source. This information is what lets us infer parameters. The example signal is GW150914. I made this explainer with Ban Farr and Nutsinee Kijbunchoo for the LIGO Magazine.

The waveform for a binary black hole merger has three fuzzily defined parts: the inspiral (where the two black holes orbit each other), the merger (where the black holes plunge together and form a single black hole) and ringdown (where the final black hole relaxes to its final state). Having waveforms which include all of these stages is a fairly recent development, and we’re still working on efficient ways of including all the effects of the spin of the initial black holes.

We currently have two favourite binary black hole waveforms for parameter estimation:

The first we refer to as EOBNR, short for its proper name of SEOBNRv2_ROM_DoubleSpin. This is constructed by using some cunning analytic techniques to calculate the dynamics (known as effective-one-body or EOB) and tuning the results to match numerical relativity (NR) simulations. This waveform only includes the effects of spins aligned with the orbital angular momentum of the binary, so it doesn’t allow us to measure the effects of precession (wobbling around caused by the spins).
The second we refer to as IMRPhenom, short for IMRPhenomPv2. This is constructed by fitting to the frequency dependence of EOB and NR waveforms. The dominant effects of precession of included by twisting up the waveform.

We’re currently working on results using a waveform that includes the full effects of spin, but that is extremely slow (it’s about half done now), so those results won’t be out for a while.

The results from the two waveforms agree really well, even though they’ve been created by different teams using different pieces of physics. This was a huge relief when I was first making a comparison of results! (We had been worried about systematic errors from waveform modelling). The consistency of results is partly because our models have improved and partly because the properties of the source are such that the remaining differences aren’t important. We’re quite confident that we’ve most of the parameters are reliably measured!

The component masses are the most important factor for controlling the evolution of the waveform, but we don’t measure the two masses independently. The evolution of the inspiral is dominated by a combination called the chirp mass, and the merger and ringdown are dominated by the total mass. For lighter mass systems, where we gets lots of inspiral, we measure the chirp mass really well, and for high mass systems, where the merger and ringdown are the loudest parts, we measure the total mass. GW150914 is somewhere in the middle. The probability distribution for the masses are shown below: we can compensate for one of the component masses being smaller if we make the other larger, as this keeps chirp mass and total mass about the same.

Estimated masses for the two black holes in the binary. Results are shown for the EOBNR waveform and the IMRPhenom: both agree well. The Overall results come from averaging the two. The dotted lines mark the edge of our 90% probability intervals. The sharp diagonal line cut-off in the two-dimensional plot is a consequence of requiring $m_1^\mathrm{source} \geq m_2^\mathrm{source}$ . Fig. 1 from the Parameter Estimation Paper.

To work out these masses, we need to take into account the expansion of the Universe. As the Universe expands, it stretches the wavelength of the gravitational waves. The same happens to light: visible light becomes redder, so the phenomenon is known as redshifting (even for gravitational waves). If you don’t take this into account, the masses you measure are too large. To work out how much redshift there is you need to know the distance to the source. The probability distribution for the distance is shown below, we plot the distance together with the inclination, since both of these affect the amplitude of the waves (the source is quietest when we look at it edge-on from the side, and loudest when seen face-on/off from above/below).

Estimated luminosity distance and binary inclination angle. An inclination of $\theta_{JN} = 90^\circ$ means we are looking at the binary (approximately) edge-on. Results are shown for the EOBNR waveform and the IMRPhenom: both agree well. The Overall results come from averaging the two. The dotted lines mark the edge of our 90% probability intervals. Fig. 2 from the Parameter Estimation Paper.

After the masses, the most important properties for the evolution of the binary are the spins. We don’t measure these too well, but the probability distribution for their magnitudes and orientations from the precessing IMRPhenom model are shown below. Both waveform models agree that the effective spin $\chi_\mathrm{eff}$ , which is a combination of both spins in the direction of the orbital angular momentum) is small. Therefore, either the spins are small or are larger but not aligned (or antialigned) with the orbital angular momentum. The spin of the more massive black hole is the better measured of the two.

Estimated orientation and magnitude of the two component spins from the precessing IMRPhenom model. The magnitude is between 0 and 1 and is perfectly aligned with the orbital angular momentum if the angle is 0. The distribution for the more massive black hole is on the left, and for the smaller black hole on the right. Part of Fig. 5 from the Parameter Estimation Paper.

The Testing General Relativity Paper

Synopsis: Testing General Relativity Paper
Read this if: You want to know more about the nature of gravity.
Favourite part: Einstein was right! (Or more correctly, we can’t prove he was wrong… yet)

The Testing General Relativity Paper is one of my favourites as it packs a lot of science in. Our first direct detection of gravitational waves and of the merger of two black holes provides a new laboratory to test gravity, and this paper runs through the results of the first few experiments.

Before we start making any claims about general relativity being wrong, we first have to check if there’s any weird noise present. You don’t want to have to rewrite the textbooks just because of an instrumental artifact. After taking out a good guess for the waveform (as predicted by general relativity), we find that the residuals do match what we expect for instrumental noise, so we’re good to continue.

I’ve written about a couple of tests of general relativity in my previous post: the consistency of the inspiral and merger–ringdown parts of the waveform, and the bounds on the mass of the graviton (from evolution of the signal). I’ll cover the others now.

The final part of the signal, where the black hole settles down to its final state (the ringdown), is the place to look to check that the object is a black hole and not some other type of mysterious dark and dense object. It is tricky to measure this part of the signal, but we don’t see anything odd. We can’t yet confirm that the object has all the properties you’d want to pin down that it is exactly a black hole as predicted by general relativity; we’re going to have to wait for a louder signal for this. This test is especially poignant, as Steven Detweiler, who pioneered a lot of the work calculating the ringdown of black holes, died a week before the announcement.

We can allow terms in our waveform (here based on the IMRPhenom model) to vary and see which values best fit the signal. If there is evidence for differences compared with the predictions from general relativity, we would have evidence for needing an alternative. Results for this analysis are shown below for a set of different waveform parameters $\hat{p}_i$ : the $\varphi_i$ parameters determine the inspiral, the $\alpha_i$ parameters determine the merger–ringdown and the $\beta_i$ parameters cover the intermediate regime. If the deviation $\delta \hat{p}_i$ is zero, the value coincides with the value from general relativity. The plot shows what would happen if you allow all the variable to vary at once (the multiple results) and if you tried just that parameter on its own (the single results).

Probability distributions for waveform parameters. The single analysis only varies one parameter, the multiple analysis varies all of them, and the J0737-3039 result is the existing bound from the double pulsar. A deviation of zero is consistent with general relativity. Fig. 7 from the Testing General Relativity Paper.

Overall the results look good. Some of the single results are centred away from zero, but we think that this is just a random fluctuate caused by noise (we’ve seen similar behaviour in tests, so don’t panic yet). It’s not surprising the $\varphi_3$ , $\varphi_4$ and $\varphi_{5l}$ all show this behaviour, as they are sensitive to similar noise features. These measurements are much tighter than from any test we’ve done before, except for the measurement of $\varphi_0$ which is better measured from the double pulsar (since we have lots and lots of orbits of that measured).

The final test is to look for additional polarizations of gravitational waves. These are predicted in several alternative theories of gravity. Unfortunately, because we only have two detectors which are pretty much aligned we can’t say much, at least without knowing for certain the location of the source. Extra detectors will be useful here!

In conclusion, we have found no evidence to suggest we need to throw away general relativity, but future events will help us to perform new and stronger tests.

The Rates Paper

Synopsis: Rates Paper
Read this if: You want to know how often binary black holes merge (and how many we’ll detect)
Favourite part: There’s a good chance we’ll have ten detections by the end of our second observing run (O2)

Before September 14, we had never seen a binary stellar-mass black hole system. We were therefore rather uncertain about how many we would see. We had predictions based on simulations of the evolution of stars and their dynamical interactions. These said we shouldn’t be too surprised if we saw something in O1, but that we shouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t see anything for many years either. We weren’t really expecting to see a black hole system so soon (the smart money was on a binary neutron star). However, we did find a binary black hole, and this happened right at the start of our observations! What do we now believe about the rate of mergers?

To work out the rate, you first need to count the number of events you have detected and then work out how sensitive you are to the population of signals (how many could you see out of the total).

Counting detections sounds simple: we have GW150914 without a doubt. However, what about all the quieter signals? If you have 100 events each with a 1% probability of being real, then even though you can’t say with certainty that anyone is an actual signal, you would expect one to be so. We want to work out how many events are real and how many are due to noise. Handily, trying to tell apart different populations of things when you’re not certain about individual members is a common problem is astrophysics (where it’s often difficult to go and check what something actually is), so there exists a probabilistic framework for doing this.

Using the expected number of real and noise events for a given detection statistic (as described in the Compact Binary Coalescence Paper), we count the number of detections and as a bonus, get a probability that each event is of astrophysical origin. There are two events with more than a 50% chance of being real: GW150914, where the probability is close to 100%, and LVT151012, where to probability is 84% based on GstLAL and 91% based on PyCBC.

By injecting lots of fake signals into some data and running our detection pipelines, we can work out how sensitive they are (in effect, how far away can they find particular types of sources). For a given number of detections, the more sensitive we are, the lower the actual rate of mergers should be (for lower sensitivity we would miss more, while there’s no hiding for higher sensitivity).

There is one final difficulty in working out the total number of binary black hole mergers: we need to know the distribution of masses, because our sensitivity depends on this. However, we don’t yet know this as we’ve only seen GW150914 and (maybe) LVT151012. Therefore, we try three possibilities to get an idea of what the merger rate could be.

We assume that binary black holes are either like GW150914 or like LVT151012. Given that these are our only possible detections at the moment, this should give a reasonable estimate. A similar approach has been used for estimating the population of binary neutron stars from pulsar observations [bonus note].
We assume that the distribution of masses is flat in the logarithm of the masses. This probably gives more heavy black holes than in reality (and so a lower merger rate)
We assume that black holes follow a power law like the initial masses of stars. This probably gives too many low mass black holes (and so a higher merger rate)

The estimated merger rates (number of binary black hole mergers per volume per time) are then: 1. $83^{+168}_{-63}~\mathrm{Gpc^{-3}\,yr^{-1}}$ ; 2. $61^{+124}_{-48}~\mathrm{Gpc^{-3}\,yr^{-1}}$ , and 3. $200^{+400}_{-160}~\mathrm{Gpc^{-3}\,yr^{-1}}$ . There is a huge scatter, but the flat and power-law rates hopefully bound the true value.

We’ll pin down the rate better after a few more detections. How many more should we expect to see? Using the projected sensitivity of the detectors over our coming observing runs, we can work out the probability of making $N$ more detections. This is shown in the plot below. It looks like there’s about about a 10% chance of not seeing anything else in O1, but we’re confident that we’ll have 10 more by the end of O2, and 35 more by the end of O3! I may need to lie down…

The percentage chance of making 0, 10, 35 and 70 more detections of binary black holes as time goes on and detector sensitivity improves (based upon our data so far). This is a simplified version of part of Fig. 3 of the Rates Paper taken from the science summary.

The Burst Paper

Synopsis: Burst Paper
Read this if: You want to check what we can do without a waveform template
Favourite part: You don’t need a template to make a detection

When discussing what we can learn from gravitational wave astronomy, you can almost guarantee that someone will say something about discovering the unexpected. Whenever we’ve looked at the sky in a new band of the electromagnetic spectrum, we found something we weren’t looking for: pulsars for radio, gamma-ray burst for gamma-rays, etc. Can we do the same in gravitational wave astronomy? There may well be signals we weren’t anticipating out there, but will we be able to detect them? The burst pipelines have our back here, at least for short signals.

The burst search pipelines, like their compact binary coalescence partners, assign candidate events a detection statistic and then work out a probability associated with being a false alarm caused by noise. The difference is that the burst pipelines try to find a wider range of signals.

There are three burst pipelines described: coherent WaveBurst (cWB), which famously first found GW150914; omicron–LALInferenceBurst (oLIB), and BayesWave, which follows up on cWB triggers.

As you might guess from the name, cWB looks for a coherent signal in both detectors. It looks for excess power (indicating a signal) in a time–frequency plot, and then classifies candidates based upon their structure. There’s one class for blip glitches and resonance lines (see the Detector Characterisation Paper), these are all thrown away as noise; one class for chirp-like signals that increase in frequency with time, this is where GW150914 was found, and one class for everything else. cWB’s detection statistic $\eta_c$ is something like a signal-to-noise ratio constructed based upon the correlated power in the detectors. The value for GW150914 was $\eta_c = 20$ , which is higher than for any other candidate. The false alarm probability (or p-value), folding in all three search classes, is $2\times 10^{-6}$ , which is pretty tiny, even if not as significant as for the tailored compact binary searches.

The oLIB search has two stages. First it makes a time–frequency plot and looks for power coincident between the two detectors. Likely candidates are then followed up by matching a sine–Gaussian wavelet to the data, using a similar algorithm to the one used for parameter estimation. It’s detection statistic is something like a likelihood ratio for the signal verses noise. It calculates a false alarm probability of about $2\times 10^{-6}$ too.

BayesWave fits a variable number of sine–Gaussian wavelets to the data. This can model both a signal (when the wavelets are the same for both detectors) and glitches (when the wavelets are independent). This is really clever, but is too computationally expensive to be left running on all the data. Therefore, it follows up on things highlighted by cWB, potentially increasing their significance. It’s detection statistic is the Bayes factor comparing the signal and glitch models. It estimates the false alarm probability to be about $7 \times 10^{-7}$ (which agrees with the cWB estimate if you only consider chirp-like triggers).

None of the searches find LVT151012. However, as this is a quiet, lower mass binary black hole, I think that this is not necessarily surprising.

cWB and BayesWave also output a reconstruction of the waveform. Reassuringly, this does look like binary black hole coalescence!

Estimated waveforms from different models

Gravitational waveforms from our analyses of GW150914. The wiggly grey line are the data from Hanford (top) and Livinston (bottom); these are analysed coherently. The plots show waveforms whitened by the noise power spectral density. The dark band shows the waveform reconstructed by BayesWave without assuming that the signal is from a binary black hole (BBH). The light bands show the distribution of BBH template waveforms that were found to be most probable from our parameter-estimation analysis. The two techniques give consistent results: the match between the two models is $94^{+2}_{-3}\%$ . Fig. 6 of the Parameter Estimation Paper.

The paper concludes by performing some simple fits to the reconstructed waveforms. For this, you do have to assume that the signal cane from a binary black hole. They find parameters roughly consistent with those from the full parameter-estimation analysis, which is a nice sanity check of our results.

The Detector Characterisation Paper

Synopsis: Detector Characteristation Paper
Read this if: You’re curious if something other than a gravitational wave could be responsible for GW150914 or LVT151012
Favourite part: Mega lightning bolts can cause correlated noise

The output from the detectors that we analyses for signals is simple. It is a single channel that records the strain. To monitor instrumental behaviour and environmental conditions the detector characterisation team record over 200,000 other channels. These measure everything from the alignment of the optics through ground motion to incidence of cosmic rays. Most of the data taken by LIGO is to monitor things which are not gravitational waves.

This paper examines all the potential sources of noise in the LIGO detectors, how we monitor them to ensure they are not confused for a signal, and the impact they could have on estimating the significance of events in our searches. It is amazingly thorough work.

There are lots of potential noise sources for LIGO. Uncorrelated noise sources happen independently at both sites, therefore they can only be mistaken for a gravitational wave if by chance two occur at the right time. Correlated noise sources effect both detectors, and so could be more confusing for our searches, although there’s no guarantee that they would cause a disturbance that looks anything like a binary black hole merger.

Sources of uncorrelated noise include:

Ground motion caused by earthquakes or ocean waves. These create wibbling which can affect the instruments, even though they are well isolated. This is usually at low frequencies (below $0.1~\mathrm{Hz}$ for earthquakes, although it can be higher if the epicentre is near), unless there is motion in the optics around (which can couple to cause higher frequency noise). There is a network of seismometers to measure earthquakes at both sites. There where two magnitude 2.1 earthquakes within 20 minutes of GW150914 (one off the coast of Alaska, the other south-west of Seattle), but both produced ground motion that is ten times too small to impact the detectors. There was some low frequency noise in Livingston at the time of LVT151012 which is associated with a period of bad ocean waves. however, there is no evidence that these could be converted to the frequency range associated with the signal.
People moving around near the detectors can also cause vibrational or acoustic disturbances. People are kept away from the detectors while they are running and accelerometers, microphones and seismometers monitor the environment.
Modulation of the lasers at $9~\mathrm{MHz}$ and $45~\mathrm{MHz}$ is done to monitor and control several parts of the optics. There is a fault somewhere in the system which means that there is a coupling to the output channel and we get noise across $10~\mathrm{Hz}$ to $2~\mathrm{kHz}$ , which is where we look for compact binary coalescences. Rai Weiss suggested shutting down the instruments to fix the source of this and delaying the start of observations—it’s a good job we didn’t. Periods of data where this fault occurs are flagged and not included in the analysis.
Blip transients are a short glitch that occurs for unknown reasons. They’re quite mysterious. They are at the right frequency range ( $30~\mathrm{Hz}$ to $250~\mathrm{Hz}$ ) to be confused with binary black holes, but don’t have the right frequency evolution. They contribute to the background of noise triggers in the compact binary coalescence searches, but are unlikely to be the cause of GW150914 or LVT151012 since they don’t have the characteristic chirp shape.
A time–frequency plot of a blip glitch in LIGO-Livingston. Blip glitches are the right frequency range to be confused with binary coalescences, but don’t have the chirp-like structure. Blips are symmetric in time, whereas binary coalescences sweep up in frequency. Fig. 3 of the Detector Characterisation Paper.

Correlated noise can be caused by:

Electromagnetic signals which can come from lightning, solar weather or radio communications. This is measured by radio receivers and magnetometers, and its extremely difficult to produce a signal that is strong enough to have any impact of the detectors’ output. There was one strong (peak current of about $500~\mathrm{kA}$ ) lightning strike in the same second as GW150914 over Burkino Faso. However, the magnetic disturbances were at least a thousand times too small to explain the amplitude of GW150914.
Cosmic ray showers can cause electromagnetic radiation and particle showers. The particle flux become negligible after a few kilometres, so it’s unlikely that both Livingston and Hanford would be affected, but just in case there is a cosmic ray detector at Hanford. It has seen nothing suspicious.

All the monitoring channels give us a lot of insight into the behaviour of the instruments. Times which can be identified as having especially bad noise properties (where the noise could influence the measured output), or where the detectors are not working properly, are flagged and not included in the search analyses. Applying these vetoes mean that we can’t claim a detection when we know something else could mimic a gravitational wave signal, but it also helps us clean up our background of noise triggers. This has the impact of increasing the significance of the triggers which remain (since there are fewer false alarms they could be confused with). For example, if we leave the bad period in, the PyCBC false alarm probability for LVT151012 goes up from $0.02$ to $0.14$ . The significance of GW150914 is so great that we don’t really need to worry about the effects of vetoes.

At the time of GW150914 the detectors were running well, the data around the event are clean, and there is nothing in any of the auxiliary channels that record anything which could have caused the event. The only source of a correlated signal which has not been rules out is a gravitational wave from a binary black hole merger. The time–frequency plots of the measured strains are shown below, and its easy to pick out the chirps.

Time–frequency plots for GW150914 as measured by Hanford (left) and Livingston (right). These show the characteristic increase in frequency with time of the chirp of a binary merger. The signal is clearly visible above the noise. Fig. 10 of the Detector Characterisation Paper.

The data around LVT151012 are significantly less stationary than around GW150914. There was an elevated noise transient rate around this time. This is probably due to extra ground motion caused by ocean waves. This low frequency noise is clearly visible in the Livingston time–frequency plot below. There is no evidence that this gets converted to higher frequencies though. None of the detector characterisation results suggest that LVT151012 has was caused by a noise artifact.

Time–frequency plots for LVT151012 as measured by Hanford (left) and Livingston (right). You can see the characteristic increase in frequency with time of the chirp of a binary merger, but this is mixed in with noise. The scale is reduced compared with for GW150914, which is why noise features appear more prominent. The band at low frequency in Livingston is due to ground motion; this is not present in Hanford. Fig. 13 of the Detector Characterisation Paper.

If you’re curious about the state of the LIGO sites and their array of sensors, you can see more about the physical environment monitors at pem.ligo.org.

The Calibration Paper

Synopsis: Calibration Paper
Read this if: You like control engineering or precision measurement
Favourite part: Not only are the LIGO detectors sensitive enough to feel the push from a beam of light, they are so sensitive that you have to worry about where on the mirrors you push

We want to measure the gravitational wave strain—the change in length across our detectors caused by a passing gravitational wave. What we actually record is the intensity of laser light out the output of our interferometer. (The output should be dark when the strain is zero, and the intensity increases when the interferometer is stretched or squashed). We need a way to convert intensity to strain, and this requires careful calibration of the instruments.

The calibration is complicated by the control systems. The LIGO instruments are incredibly sensitive, and maintaining them in a stable condition requires lots of feedback systems. These can impact how the strain is transduced into the signal readout by the interferometer. A schematic of how what would be the change in the length of the arms without control systems $\Delta L_\mathrm{free}$ is changed into the measured strain $h$ is shown below. The calibration pipeline build models to correct for the effects of the control system to provide an accurate model of the true gravitational wave strain.

Model for how a differential arm length caused by a gravitational wave $\Delta L_\mathrm{free}$ or a photon calibration signal $x_\mathrm{T}^\mathrm{(PC)}$ is converted into the measured signal $h$ . Fig. 2 from the Calibration Paper.

To measure the different responses of the system, the calibration team make several careful measurements. The primary means is using photon calibration: an auxiliary laser is used to push the mirrors and the response is measured. The spots where the lasers are pointed are carefully chosen to minimise distortion to the mirrors caused by pushing on them. A secondary means is to use actuators which are parts of the suspension system to excite the system.

As a cross-check, we can also use two auxiliary green lasers to measure changes in length using either a frequency modulation or their wavelength. These are similar approaches to those used in initial LIGO. These go give consistent results with the other methods, but they are not as accurate.

Overall, the uncertainty in the calibration of the amplitude of the strain is less than $10\%$ between $20~\mathrm{Hz}$ and $1~\mathrm{kHz}$ , and the uncertainty in phase calibration is less than $10^\circ$ . These are the values that we use in our parameter-estimation runs. However, the calibration uncertainty actually varies as a function of frequency, with some ranges having much less uncertainty. We’re currently working on implementing a better model for the uncertainty, which may improve our measurements. Fortunately the masses, aren’t too affected by the calibration uncertainty, but sky localization is, so we might get some gain here. We’ll hopefully produce results with updated calibration in the near future.

The Astrophysics Paper

Synopsis: Astrophysics Paper
Read this if: You are interested in how binary black holes form
Favourite part: We might be able to see similar mass binary black holes with eLISA before they merge in the LIGO band [bonus note]

This paper puts our observations of GW150914 in context with regards to existing observations of stellar-mass black holes and theoretical models for binary black hole mergers. Although it doesn’t explicitly mention LVT151012, most of the conclusions would be just as applicable to it’s source, if it is real. I expect there will be rapid development of the field now, but if you want to catch up on some background reading, this paper is the place to start.

The paper contains lots of references to good papers to delve into. It also highlights the main conclusion we can draw in italics, so its easy to skim through if you want a summary. I discussed the main astrophysical conclusions in my previous post. We will know more about binary black holes and their formation when we get more observations, so I think it is a good time to get interested in this area.

The Stochastic Paper

Synopsis: Stochastic Paper
Read this if: You like stochastic backgrounds
Favourite part: We might detect a background in the next decade

A stochastic gravitational wave background could be created by an incoherent superposition of many signals. In pulsar timing, they are looking for a background from many merging supermassive black holes. Could we have a similar thing from stellar-mass black holes? The loudest signals, like GW150914, are resolvable, they stand out from the background. However, for every loud signal, there will be many quiet signals, and the ones below our detection threshold could form a background. Since we’ve found that binary black hole mergers are probably plentiful, the background may be at the high end of previous predictions.

The background from stellar-mass black holes is different than the one from supermassive black holes because the signals are short. While the supermassive black holes produce an almost constant hum throughout your observations, stellar-mass black hole mergers produce short chirps. Instead of having lots of signals that overlap in time, we have a popcorn background, with one arriving on average every 15 minutes. This might allow us to do some different things when it comes to detection, but for now, we just use the standard approach.

This paper calculates the energy density of gravitational waves from binary black holes, excluding the contribution from signals loud enough to be detected. This is done for several different models. The standard (fiducial) model assumes parameters broadly consistent with those of GW150914’s source, plus a particular model for the formation of merging binaries. There are then variations on the the model for formation, considering different time delays between formation and merger, and adding in lower mass systems consistent with LVT151012. All these models are rather crude, but give an idea of potential variations in the background. Hopefully more realistic distributions will be considered in the future. There is some change between models, but this is within the (considerable) statistical uncertainty, so predictions seems robust.

Models for a binary black hole stochastic background

Different models for the stochastic background of binary black holes. This is plotted in terms of energy density. The red band indicates the uncertainty on the fiducial model. The dashed line indicates the sensitivity of the LIGO and Virgo detectors after several years at design sensitivity. Fig. 2 of the Stochastic Paper.

After a couple of years at design sensitivity we may be able to make a confident detection of the stochastic background. The background from binary black holes is more significant than we expected.

If you’re wondering about if we could see other types of backgrounds, such as one of cosmological origin, then the background due to binary black holes could make detection more difficult. In effect, it acts as another source of noise, masking the other background. However, we may be able to distinguish the different backgrounds by measuring their frequency dependencies (we expect them to have different slopes), if they are loud enough.

The Neutrino Paper

Synopsis: Neutrino Paper
Read this if: You really like high energy neutrinos
Favourite part: We’re doing astronomy with neutrinos and gravitational waves—this is multimessenger astronomy without any form of electromagnetic radiation

There are multiple detectors that can look for high energy neutrinos. Currently, LIGO–Virgo Observations are being followed up by searches from ANTARES and IceCube. Both of these are Cherenkov detectors: they look for flashes of light created by fast moving particles, not the neutrinos themselves, but things they’ve interacted with. ANTARES searches the waters of the Mediterranean while IceCube uses the ice of Antarctica.

Within 500 seconds either side of the time of GW150914, ANTARES found no neutrinos and IceCube found three. These results are consistent with background levels (you would expect on average less than one and 4.4 neutrinos over that time from the two respectively). Additionally, none of the IceCube neutrinos are consistent with the sky localization of GW150914 (even though the sky area is pretty big). There is no sign of a neutrino counterpart, which is what we were expecting.

Subsequent non-detections have been reported by KamLAND, the Pierre Auger Observatory, Super-Kamiokande, Borexino and NOvA.

The Electromagnetic Follow-up Paper

Synopsis: Electromagnetic Follow-up Paper
Read this if: You are interested in the search for electromagnetic counterparts
Favourite part: So many people were involved in this work that not only do we have to abbreviate the list of authors (Abbott, B.P. et al.), but we should probably abbreviate the list of collaborations too (LIGO Scientific & Virgo Collaboration et al.)

This is the last of the set of companion papers to be released—it took a huge amount of coordinating because of all the teams involved. The paper describes how we released information about GW150914. This should not be typical of how we will do things going forward (i) because we didn’t have all the infrastructure in place on September 14 and (ii) because it was the first time we had something we thought was real.

The first announcement was sent out on September 16, and this contained sky maps from the Burst codes cWB and LIB. In the future, we should be able to send out automated alerts with a few minutes latency.

For the first alert, we didn’t have any results which assumed the the source was a binary, as the searches which issue triggers at low latency were only looking for lower mass systems which would contain a neutron star. I suspect we’ll be reprioritising things going forward. The first information we shared about the potential masses for the source was shared on October 3. Since this was the first detection, everyone was cautious about triple-checking results, which caused the delay. Revised false alarm rates including results from GstLAL and PyCBC were sent out October 20.

The final sky maps were shared January 13. This is when we’d about finished our own reviews and knew that we would be submitting the papers soon [bonus note]. Our best sky map is the one from the Parameter Estimation Paper. You might it expect to be more con straining than the results from the burst pipelines since it uses a proper model for the gravitational waves from a binary black hole. This is the case if we ignore calibration uncertainty (which is not yet included in the burst codes), then the 50% area is $48~\mathrm{deg}^2$ and the 90% area is $150~\mathrm{deg^2}$ . However, including calibration uncertainty, the sky areas are $150~\mathrm{deg^2}$ and $590~\mathrm{deg^2}$ at 50% and 90% probability respectively. Calibration uncertainty has the largest effect on sky area. All the sky maps agree that the source is in in some region of the annulus set by the time delay between the two detectors.

The different sky maps for GW150914 in an orthographic projection. The contours show the 90% region for each algorithm. The faint circles show lines of constant time delay $\Delta t_\mathrm{HL}$ between the two detectors. BAYESTAR rapidly computes sky maps for binary coalescences, but it needs the output of one of the detection pipelines to run, and so was not available at low latency. The LALInference map is our best result. All the sky maps are available as part of the data release. Fig. 2 of the Electromagnetic Follow-up Paper.

A timeline of events is shown below. There were follow-up observations across the electromagnetic spectrum from gamma-rays and X-rays through the optical and near infra-red to radio.

Timeline for observations of GW15014. The top (grey) band shows information about gravitational waves. The second (blue) band shows high-energy (gamma- and X-ray) observations. The third and fourth (green) bands show optical and near infra-red observations respectively. The bottom (red) band shows radio observations. Fig. 1 from the Electromagnetic Follow-up Paper.

Observations have been reported (via GCN notices) by

the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) Collaboration
the BOOTES Collaboration
the Dark Energy Camera GW–EM Collaboration (Paper I, Paper II)
the Fermi GBM Collaboration
the Fermi LAT Collaboration
the Gravitational Wave Inaf Team (GRAWITA)
the INTEGRAL Collaboration
the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) Collaboration (radio follow-up from the Jansky Very Large Array)
the Interplanetary Network (IPN)
the J-GEM Collaboration
the La Silla–Quest Survey
the Liverpool Telescope Collaboration
the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) Collaboration
the MASTER Collaboration
the Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) Collaboration
the Murchison Wide-field Array (MWA) Collaboration
the Pan-STARRS Collaboration and the PESSTO Collaboration
the Pi of the Sky Collaboration
the SkyMapper Collaboration
the Swift Collaboration
the TAROT, Zadko, Algerian National Observatory and C2PU Collaboration
the TOROS Collaboration
the VISTA Collaboration

Together they cover an impressive amount of the sky as shown below. Many targeted the Large Magellanic Cloud before the knew the source was a binary black hole.

Footprints of observations compared with the 50% and 90% areas of the initially distributed (cWB: thick lines; LIB: thin lines) sky maps, also in orthographic projection. The all-sky observations are not shown. The grey background is the Galactic plane. Fig. 3 of the Electromagnetic Follow-up Paper.

Additional observations have been done using archival data by XMM-Newton and AGILE.

We don’t expect any electromagnetic counterpart to a binary black hole. No-one found anything with the exception of Fermi GBM. This has found a weak signal which may be coincident. More work is required to figure out if this is genuine (the statistical analysis looks OK, but some times you do have a false alarm). It would be a surprise if it is, so most people are sceptical. However, I think this will make people more interested in following up on our next binary black hole signal!

Bonus notes

Naming The Event

GW150914 is the name we have given to the signal detected by the two LIGO instruments. The “GW” is short for gravitational wave (not galactic worm), and the numbers give the date the wave reached the detectors (2015 September 14). It was originally known as G184098, its ID in our database of candidate events (most circulars sent to and from our observer partners use this ID). That was universally agreed to be terrible to remember. We tried to think of a good nickname for the event, but failed to, so rather by default, it has informally become known as The Event within the Collaboration. I think this is fitting given its significance.

LVT151012 is the name of the most significant candidate after GW150914, it doesn’t reach our criteria to claim detection (a false alarm rate of less than once per century), which is why it’s not GW151012. The “LVT” is short for LIGO–Virgo trigger. It took a long time to settle on this and up until the final week before the announcement it was still going by G197392. Informally, it was known as The Second Monday Event, as it too was found on a Monday. You’ll have to wait for us to finish looking at the rest of the O1 data to see if the Monday trend continues. If it does, it could have serious repercussions for our understanding of Garfield.

Following the publication of the O2 Catalogue Paper, LVT151012 was upgraded to GW151012, AND we decided to get rid of the LVT class as it was rather confusing.

Publishing in Physical Review Letters

Several people have asked me if the Discovery Paper was submitted to Science or Nature. It was not. The decision that any detection would be submitted to Physical Review was made ahead of the run. As far as I am aware, there was never much debate about this. Physical Review had been good about publishing all our non-detections and upper limits, so it only seemed fair that they got the discovery too. You don’t abandon your friends when you strike it rich. I am glad that we submitted to them.

Gaby González, the LIGO Spokesperson, contacted the editors of Physical Review Letters ahead of submission to let them know of the anticipated results. They then started to line up some referees to give confidential and prompt reviews.

The initial plan was to submit on January 19, and we held a Collaboration-wide tele-conference to discuss the science. There were a few more things still to do, so the paper was submitted on January 21, following another presentation (and a long discussion of whether a number should be a six or a two) and a vote. The vote was overwhelmingly in favour of submission.

We got the referee reports back on January 27, although they were circulated to the Collaboration the following day. This was a rapid turnaround! From their comments, I suspect that Referee A may be a particle physicist who has dealt with similar claims of first detection—they were most concerned about statistical significance; Referee B seemed like a relativist—they made comments about the effect of spin on measurements, knew about waveforms and even historical papers on gravitational waves, and I would guess that Referee C was an astronomer involved with pulsars—they mentioned observations of binary pulsars potentially claiming the title of first detection and were also curious about sky localization. While I can’t be certain who the referees were, I am certain that I have never had such positive reviews before! Referee A wrote

The paper is extremely well written and clear. These results are obviously going to make history.

Referee B wrote

This paper is a major breakthrough and a milestone in gravitational science. The results are overall very well presented and its suitability for publication in Physical Review Letters is beyond question.

and Referee C wrote

It is an honor to have the opportunity to review this paper. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it is the most enjoyable paper I’ve ever read. […] I unreservedly recommend the paper for publication in Physical Review Letters. I expect that it will be among the most cited PRL papers ever.

I suspect I will never have such emphatic reviews again [happy bonus note][unhappy bonus note].

Publishing in Physical Review Letters seems to have been a huge success. So much so that their servers collapsed under the demand, despite them adding two more in anticipation. In the end they had to quintuple their number of servers to keep up with demand. There were 229,000 downloads from their website in the first 24 hours. Many people remarked that it was good that the paper was freely available. However, we always make our papers public on the arXiv or via LIGO’s Document Control Center [bonus bonus note], so there should never be a case where you miss out on reading a LIGO paper!

Publishing the Parameter Estimation Paper

The reviews for the Parameter Estimation Paper were also extremely positive. Referee A, who had some careful comments on clarifying notation, wrote

This is a beautiful paper on a spectacular result.

Referee B, who commendably did some back-of-the-envelope checks, wrote

The paper is also very well written, and includes enough background that I think a decent fraction of it will be accessible to non-experts. This, together with the profound nature of the results (first direct detection of gravitational waves, first direct evidence that Kerr black holes exist, first direct evidence that binary black holes can form and merge in a Hubble time, first data on the dynamical strong-field regime of general relativity, observation of stellar mass black holes more massive than any observed to date in our galaxy), makes me recommend this paper for publication in PRL without hesitation.

Referee C, who made some suggestions to help a non-specialist reader, wrote

This is a generally excellent paper describing the properties of LIGO’s first detection.

Physical Review Letters were also kind enough to publish this paper open access without charge!

Publishing the Rates Paper

It wasn’t all clear sailing getting the companion papers published. Referees did give papers the thorough checking that they deserved. The most difficult review was of the Rates Paper. There were two referees, one astrophysics, one statistics. The astrophysics referee was happy with the results and made a few suggestions to clarify or further justify the text. The statistics referee has more serious complaints…

There are five main things which I think made the statistics referee angry. First, the referee objected to our terminology

While overall I’ve been impressed with the statistics in LIGO papers, in one respect there is truly egregious malpractice, but fortunately easy to remedy. It concerns incorrectly using the term “false alarm probability” (FAP) to refer to what statisticians call a p-value, a deliberately vague term (“false alarm rate” is similarly misused). […] There is nothing subtle or controversial about the LIGO usage being erroneous, and the practice has to stop, not just within this paper, but throughout the LIGO collaboration (and as a matter of ApJ policy).

I agree with this. What we call the false alarm probability is not the probability that the detection is a false alarm. It is not the probability that the given signal is noise rather that astrophysical, but instead it is the probability that if we only had noise that we would get a detection statistic as significant or more so. It might take a minute to realise why those are different. The former (the one we should call p-value) is what the search pipelines give us, but is less useful than the latter for actually working out if the signal is real. The probabilities calculated in the Rates Paper that the signal is astrophysical are really what you want.

p-values are often misinterpreted, but most scientists are aware of this, and so are cautious when they come across them

As a consequence of this complaint, the Collaboration is purging “false alarm probability” from our papers. It is used in most of the companion papers, as they were published before we got this report (and managed to convince everyone that it is important).

Second, we were lacking in references to existing literature

Regarding scholarship, the paper is quite poor. I take it the authors have written this paper with the expectation, or at least the hope, that it would be read […] If I sound frustrated, it’s because I am.

This is fair enough. The referee made some good suggestions to work done on inferring the rate of gamma-ray bursts by Loredo & Wasserman (Part I, Part II, Part III), as well as by Petit, Kavelaars, Gladman & Loredo on trans-Neptunian objects, and we made sure to add as much work as possible in revisions. There’s no excuse for not properly citing useful work!

Third, the referee didn’t understand how we could be certain of the distribution of signal-to-noise ratio $\rho$ without also worrying about the distribution of parameters like the black hole masses. The signal-to-noise ratio is inversely proportional to distance, and we expect sources to be uniformly distributed in volume. Putting these together (and ignoring corrections from cosmology) gives a distribution for signal-to-noise ratio of $p(\rho) \propto \rho^{-4}$ (Schulz 2011). This is sufficiently well known within the gravitational-wave community that we forgot that those outside wouldn’t appreciate it without some discussion. Therefore, it was useful that the referee did point this out.

Fourth, the referee thought we had made an error in our approach. They provided an alternative derivation which

if useful, should not be used directly without some kind of attribution

Unfortunately, they were missing some terms in their expressions. When these were added in, their approach reproduced our own (I had a go at checking this myself). Given that we had annoyed the referee on so many other points, it was tricky trying to convince them of this. Most of the time spent responding to the referees was actually working on the referee response and not on the paper.

Finally, the referee was unhappy that we didn’t make all our data public so that they could check things themselves. I think it would be great, and it will happen, it was just too early at the time.

LIGO Document Control Center

Papers in the LIGO Document Control Center are assigned a number starting with P (for “paper”) and then several digits. The Discover Paper’s reference is P150914. I only realised why this was the case on the day of submission.

The überbank

The set of templates used in the searches is designed to be able to catch binary neutron stars, neutron star–black hole binaries and binary neutron stars. It covers component masses from 1 to 99 solar masses, with total masses less than 100 solar masses. The upper cut off is chosen for computational convenience, rather than physical reasons: we do look for higher mass systems in a similar way, but they are easier to confuse with glitches and so we have to be more careful tuning the search. Since bank of templates is so comprehensive, it is known as the überbank. Although it could find binary neutron stars or neutron star–black hole binaries, we only discuss binary black holes here.

The template bank doesn’t cover the full parameter space, in particular it assumes that spins are aligned for the two components. This shouldn’t significantly affect its efficiency at finding signals, but gives another reason (together with the coarse placement of templates) why we need to do proper parameter estimation to measure properties of the source.

Alphabet soup

In the calculation of rates, the probabilistic means for counting sources is known as the FGMC method after its authors (who include two Birmingham colleagues and my former supervisor). The means of calculating rates assuming that the population is divided into one class to match each observation is also named for the initial of its authors as the KKL approach. The combined FGMCKKL method for estimating merger rates goes by the name alphabet soup, as that is much easier to swallow.

Multi-band gravitational wave astronomy

The prospect of detecting a binary black hole with a space-based detector and then seeing the same binary merger with ground-based detectors is especially exciting. My officemate Alberto Sesana (who’s not in LIGO) has just written a paper on the promise of multi-band gravitational wave astronomy. Black hole binaries like GW150914 could be spotted by eLISA (if you assume one of the better sensitivities for a detector with three arms). Then a few years to weeks later they merge, and spend their last moments emitting in LIGO’s band. The evolution of some binary black holes is sketched in the plot below.

Binary black hole mergers across the eLISA and LIGO frequency bands

The evolution of binary black hole mergers (shown in blue). The eLISA and Advanced LIGO sensitivity curves are shown in purple and orange respectively. As the black holes inspiral, they emit gravitational waves at higher frequency, shifting from the eLISa band to the LIGO band (where they merge). The scale at the top gives the approximate time until merger. Fig. 1 of Sesana (2016).

Seeing the signal in two bands can help in several ways. First it can increase our confidence in detection, potentially picking out signals that we wouldn’t otherwise. Second, it gives us a way to verify the calibration of our instruments. Third, it lets us improve our parameter-estimation precision—eLISA would see thousands of cycles, which lets it pin down the masses to high accuracy, these results can be combined with LIGO’s measurements of the strong-field dynamics during merger to give a fantastic overall picture of the system. Finally, since eLISA can measure the signal for a considerable time, it can well localise the source, perhaps just to a square degree; since we’ll also be able to predict when the merger will happen, you can point telescopes at the right place ahead of time to look for any electromagnetic counterparts which may exist. Opening up the gravitational wave spectrum is awesome!

The LALInference sky map

One of my jobs as part of the Parameter Estimation group was to produce the sky maps from our parameter-estimation runs. This is a relatively simple job of just running our sky area code. I had done it many times while were collecting our results, so I knew that the final versions were perfectly consistent with everything else we had seen. While I was comfortable with running the code and checking the results, I was rather nervous uploading the results to our database to be shared with our observational partners. I somehow managed to upload three copies by accident. D’oh! Perhaps future historians will someday look back at the records for G184098/GW150914 and wonder what was this idiot Christopher Berry doing? Probably no-one would every notice, but I know the records are there…

How big can a black hole be?

The signal

The source properties

The astrophysics

Exploring the upper mass gap

Hierarchical mergers

The surprise

The papers

The GW190521 Discovery Paper

The GW190521 Implications Paper

Bonus notes

Squeezing

Minimum black hole mass

Positrons

Burst searches

Quasicircular

Spin Bayes factors

Economically large

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The discovery

Vanilla black holes

Spin

Higher order multipoles

The black hole population

Einstein is not wrong yet

Just a taste of what’s to come

Bonus notes

Sleep

Notation

Effective spins

Hey! Listen!

Exactly as predicted

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Ground-based gravitational-wave detectors: The next generation

Extreme mass ratio inspirals are awesome

Bonus notes

White paper vs journal article

Recycling

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The papers

The O2 Catalogue Paper

The O2 Populations Paper

The O2 Catalogue Paper

The instruments

The searches

The source properties

Waveform reconstructions

Merger rates

The O2 Populations Paper

Masses

Spins

Redshift evolution

Bonus notes

Naming

Burning bright

August 2017—Something fishy or just Poisson statistics?

Sign errors

SEOBNRv3

Thanksgiving

Confession

New sources

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Life as a binary

Gravitational-wave observations

Results

Bonus notes

Channel selection

Kick distribution

The likelihood

Interpretation of the Fisher information matrix

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Bonus notes

Detector engineering

Parameter estimation rota

Alerts and follow-up