Real-time Search for Compact Binary Mergers in Advanced LIGO and Virgo's Third Observing Run Using PyCBC Live

The third observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo took place between 2019 April and 2020 March and resulted in dozens of gravitational-wave candidates, many of which are now published as confident detections. A crucial requirement of the third observing run was the rapid identification and public reporting of compact binary mergers, which enabled massive follow-up observation campaigns with electromagnetic and neutrino observatories. PyCBC Live is a low-latency search for compact binary mergers based on frequency-domain matched filtering, which was used during the second and third observing runs, together with other low-latency analyses, to generate these rapid alerts from the data acquired by LIGO and Virgo. This paper describes and evaluates the improvements made to PyCBC Live after the second observing run, which defined its operation and performance during the third observing run.

Populating the Black Hole Mass Gaps in Stellar Clusters: General Relations and Upper Limits

Theory and observations suggest that single-star evolution is not able to produce black holes with masses in the range 3–5M ⊙ and above ∼45M ⊙, referred to as the lower mass gap and the upper mass gap, respectively. However, it is possible to form black holes in these gaps through mergers of compact objects in, e.g., dense clusters. This implies that if binary mergers are observed in gravitational waves with at least one mass-gap object, then either clusters are effective in assembling binary mergers, or our single-star models have to be revised. Understanding how effective clusters are at populating both mass gaps have therefore major implications for both stellar and gravitational wave astrophysics. In this paper we present a systematic study of how efficient stellar clusters are at populating both mass gaps through in-cluster mergers. For this, we derive a set of closed form relations for describing the evolution of compact object binaries undergoing dynamical interactions and mergers inside their cluster. By considering both static and time-evolving populations, we find in particular that globular clusters are clearly inefficient at populating the lower mass gap in contrast to the upper mass gap. We further describe how these results relate to the characteristic mass, time, and length scales associated with the problem.

3-OGC: Catalog of Gravitational Waves from Compact-binary Mergers

We present the third open gravitational-wave catalog (3-OGC) of compact-binary coalescences, based on the analysis of the public LIGO and Virgo data from 2015 through 2019 (O1, O2, O3a). Our updated catalog includes a population of 57 observations, including 4 binary black hole mergers that had not been previously reported. This consists of 55 binary black hole mergers and the 2 binary neutron star mergers, GW170817 and GW190425. We find no additional significant binary neutron star or neutron star–black hole merger events. The most confident new detection is the binary black hole merger GW190925_232845, which was observed by the LIGO–Hanford and Virgo observatories with  astro > 0.99 ; its primary and secondary component masses are 20.2 − 2.5 + 3.9 M ⊙ and 15.6 − 2.6 + 2.1 M ⊙ , respectively. We estimate the parameters of all binary black hole events using an up-to-date waveform model that includes both subdominant harmonics and precession effects. To enable deep follow up as our understanding of the underlying populations evolves, we make available our comprehensive catalog of events, including the subthreshold population of candidates, and the posterior samples of our source parameter estimates.

Driven black holes: from Kolmogorov scaling to turbulent wakes

General relativity governs the nonlinear dynamics of spacetime, including black holes and their event horizons. We demonstrate that forced black hole horizons exhibit statistically steady turbulent spacetime dynamics consistent with Kolmogorov’s theory of 1941. As a proof of principle we focus on black holes in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes in a large number of dimensions, where greater analytic control is gained. We focus on cases where the effective horizon dynamics is restricted to 2+1 dimensions. We also demonstrate that tidal deformations of the horizon induce turbulent dynamics. When set in motion relative to the horizon a deformation develops a turbulent spacetime wake, indicating that turbulent spacetime dynamics may play a role in binary mergers and other strong-field phenomena.