Abstract
The final black hole left behind after a binary black hole merger can attain a recoil velocity, or a “kick,” reaching values up to . This phenomenon has important implications for gravitational wave astronomy, black hole formation scenarios, testing general relativity, and galaxy evolution. We consider the gravitational wave signal from the binary black hole merger GW200129_065458 (henceforth referred to as GW200129), which has been shown to exhibit strong evidence of orbital precession. Using numerical relativity surrogate models, we constrain the kick velocity of GW200129 to or (one-sided limit), at 90% credibility. This marks the first identification of a large kick velocity for an individual gravitational wave event. Given the kick velocity of GW200129, we estimate that there is a less than 0.48% (7.7%) probability that the remnant black hole after the merger would be retained by globular (nuclear star) clusters. Finally, we show that kick effects are not expected to cause biases in ringdown tests of general relativity for this event, although this may change in the future with improved detectors.
- Received 11 January 2022
- Revised 10 March 2022
- Accepted 11 April 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.191102
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.
Published by the American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
synopsis
Merged Black Hole on the Run
Published 12 May 2022
Analysis of the gravitational waves from a black hole merger suggests that the final black hole received a kick that will send it out of its galaxy.
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