GW190425: Observation of a Compact Binary Coalescence with Total Mass ~3.4 M⊙

Creators: Abbott, B. P.; Abbott, R.; Adhikari, R. X.; Anand, S.; Ananyeva, A.; Anderson, S. B.; Appert, S.; Arai, K.; Araya, M. C.; Barayoga, J. C.; Barish, B. C.; Billingsley, G.; Biscans, S.; Blackburn, J. K.; Bork, R.; Brooks, A. F.; Brunett, S.; Cahillane, C.; Callister, T. A.; Coughlin, M. W.; Couvares, P.; Coyne, D. C.; Ehrens, P.; Etzel, T.; Feicht, J.; Gossan, S. E.; Grassia, P.; Gupta, Anchal; Gustafson, E. K.; Kamai, B.; Kanner, J. B.; Kasprzack, M.; Kondrashov, V.; Korth, W. Z.; Kozak, D. B.; Lazzarini, A.; Lo, R. K. L.; Markowitz, A.; Maros, E.; Massinger, T. J.; Matichard, F.; McIver, J.; Meshkov, S.; Nevin, L.; Pedraza, M.; Reitze, D. H.; Richardson, J. W.; Robertson, N. A.; Rollins, J. G.; Sanchez, E. J.; Sanchez, L. E.; Sun, L.; Tao, D.; Taylor, R.; Torrie, C. I.; Vajente, G.; Vass, S.; Venugopalan, G.; Wade, A. R.; Wallace, L.; Weinstein, A. J.; Willis, J. L.; Wipf, C. C.; Xiao, S.; Yamamoto, H.; Zhang, L.; Zucker, M. E.; Zweizig, J.; Barkett, K.; Blackman, J.; Chen, Y.; Li, X.; Ma, Y.; Scheel, M.; Tso, R.; Varma, V.; Chatziioannou, K.

Abstract

On 2019 April 25, the LIGO Livingston detector observed a compact binary coalescence with signal-to-noise ratio 12.9. The Virgo detector was also taking data that did not contribute to detection due to a low signal-to-noise ratio, but were used for subsequent parameter estimation. The 90% credible intervals for the component masses range from 1.12 to 2.52 M⊙ (1.46 – 1.87 M⊙ if we restrict the dimensionless component spin magnitudes to be smaller than 0.05). These mass parameters are consistent with the individual binary components being neutron stars. However, both the source-frame chirp mass 1.44^(+0.02)_(-0.02) M⊙ and the total mass 3.4^(+0.3)_(-0.1) M⊙ of this system are significantly larger than those of any other known binary neutron star (BNS) system. The possibility that one or both binary components of the system are black holes cannot be ruled out from gravitational-wave data. We discuss possible origins of the system based on its inconsistency with the known Galactic BNS population. Under the assumption that the signal was produced by a BNS coalescence, the local rate of neutron star mergers is updated to 250–2810 Gpc⁻³ yr⁻¹.

Additional Information

© 2020 The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2019 December 25; revised 2020 February 12; accepted 2020 February 13; published 2020 March 19. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) for the construction and operation of the LIGO Laboratory and Advanced LIGO as well as the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the United Kingdom, the Max-Planck-Society (MPS), and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for support of the construction of Advanced LIGO and construction and operation of the GEO600 detector. Additional support for Advanced LIGO was provided by the Australian Research Council. The authors gratefully acknowledge the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, for the construction and operation of the Virgo detector and the creation and support of the EGO consortium. The authors also gratefully acknowledge research support from these agencies as well as by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of India, the Department of Science and Technology, India, the Science & Engineering Research Board (SERB), India, the Ministry of Human Resource Development, India, the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación, the Vicepresidència i Conselleria d'Innovació Recerca i Turisme and the Conselleria d'Educació i Universitat del Govern de les Illes Balears, the Conselleria d'Educació Investigació Cultura i Esport de la Generalitat Valenciana, the National Science Centre of Poland, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, the Russian Science Foundation, the European Commission, the European Regional Development Funds (ERDF), the Royal Society, the Scottish Funding Council, the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance, the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA), the Lyon Institute of Origins (LIO), the Paris Île-de-France Region, the National Research, Development and Innovation Office Hungary (NKFIH), the National Research Foundation of Korea, Industry Canada and the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovations, and Communications, the International Center for Theoretical Physics South American Institute for Fundamental Research (ICTP-SAIFR), the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the Leverhulme Trust, the Research Corporation, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Taiwan and the Kavli Foundation. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the NSF, STFC, INFN and CNRS for provision of computational resources. This work has been assigned LIGO document number LIGO-P190425. Software: The detection of the signal and subsequent significance evalution have been performed using the GstLAL-based inspiral software pipeline (Cannon et al. 2012; Privitera et al. 2014; Messick et al. 2017; Hanna et al. 2019; Sachdev et al. 2019). These are built on the LALSuite software library (LIGO Scientific Collaboration 2018). The signal was also verified using the PyCBC (Usman et al. 2016; Nitz et al. 2018, 2019), MBTAOnline (Adams et al. 2016) and SPIIR (Hooper et al. 2012; Luan et al. 2012; Chu 2017; Guo et al. 2018) packages. The parameter estimation was performed with the LALInference (Veitch et al. 2015) and LALSimulation libraries within LALSuite (LIGO Scientific Collaboration 2018); additional checks were performed using the Bilby library (Ashton et al. 2019) and the dynesty Nested Sampling package (Speagle 2019). The estimates of the noise spectra and the postmerger analysis were performed using BayesWave (Cornish & Littenberg 2015; Littenberg & Cornish 2015). The sky map plot has made use of Astropy,206 a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013; Price-Whelan et al. 2018) and ligo.skymap.207 All plots have been prepared using Matplotlib (Hunter 2007).

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