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Published January 1, 2015 | Published + Accepted Version
Journal Article Open

Spin-Precession: Breaking the Black Hole-Neutron Star Degeneracy

Abstract

Mergers of compact stellar remnants are prime targets for the LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave detectors. The gravitational wave signals from these merger events can be used to study the mass and spin distribution of stellar remnants, and provide information about black hole horizons and the material properties of neutron stars. However, it has been suggested that degeneracies in the way that the star's mass and spin are imprinted in the waveforms may make it impossible to distinguish between black holes and neutron stars. Here we show that the precession of the orbital plane due to spin-orbit coupling breaks the mass-spin degeneracy, and allows us to distinguish between standard neutron stars and alternative possibilities, such as black holes or exotic neutron stars with large masses and spins.

Additional Information

© 2015 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2014 November 1; accepted 2014 December 2; published 2014 December 17. We thank Laura Sampson for many helpful discussions and Cole Miller for providing us with information about astrophysical expectations of NS spin orientations. We thank Thomas Dent, Mark Hannam, Richard O'Shaughnessy, and Evan Ochsner for comments and suggestions. K.C. acknowledges support from the Onassis Foundation. N.Y. acknowledges support from NSF grant PHY-1114374, NSF CAREER Grant PHY-1250636 and NASA grant NNX11AI49G. A.K. and N.C. acknowledge support from the NSF Award PHY-1205993 and NASA grant NNX10AH15G.

Attached Files

Published - Chatziioannou_2015_ApJL_798_L17.pdf

Accepted Version - 1402.3581.pdf

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