Measuring the properties of nearly extremal black holes with gravitational waves

Katerina Chatziioannou, Geoffrey Lovelace, Michael Boyle, Matthew Giesler, Daniel A. Hemberger, Reza Katebi, Lawrence E. Kidder, Harald P. Pfeiffer, Mark A. Scheel, and Béla Szilágyi
Phys. Rev. D 98, 044028 – Published 21 August 2018

Abstract

Characterizing the properties of black holes is one of the most important science objectives for gravitational-wave observations. Astrophysical evidence suggests that black holes that are nearly extremal (i.e., spins near the theoretical upper limit) might exist and, thus, might be among the merging black holes observed with gravitational waves. In this paper, we explore how well current gravitational wave parameter estimation methods can measure the spins of rapidly spinning black holes in binaries. We simulate gravitational-wave signals using numerical-relativity waveforms for nearly-extremal, merging black holes. For simplicity, we confine our attention to binaries with spins parallel or antiparallel with the orbital angular momentum. We find that recovering the holes’ nearly extremal spins is challenging. When the spins are nearly extremal and parallel to each other, the resulting parameter estimates do recover spins that are large, though the recovered spin magnitudes are still significantly smaller than the true spin magnitudes. When the spins are nearly extremal and antiparallel to each other, the resulting parameter estimates recover the small effective spin but incorrectly estimate the individual spins as nearly zero. We study the effect of spin priors and argue that a commonly used prior (uniform in spin magnitude and direction) hinders unbiased recovery of large black-hole spins.

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  • Received 10 April 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.044028

© 2018 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Gravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

Authors & Affiliations

Katerina Chatziioannou1, Geoffrey Lovelace2, Michael Boyle3, Matthew Giesler4, Daniel A. Hemberger4, Reza Katebi2,5, Lawrence E. Kidder3, Harald P. Pfeiffer1,6, Mark A. Scheel4, and Béla Szilágyi4

  • 1Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, 60 St. George Street, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H8, Canada
  • 2Gravitational Wave Physics and Astronomy Center, California State University Fullerton, Fullerton, California 92834, USA
  • 3Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA
  • 4Theoretical Astrophysics 350-17, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA
  • 5Department of Physics and Astronomy, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 45701, USA
  • 6Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute), Am Mühlenberg 1, 14476 Potsdam-Golm, Germany

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Issue

Vol. 98, Iss. 4 — 15 August 2018

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