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Published October 27, 2022 | Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

General-relativistic precession in a black-hole binary

Abstract

The general-relativistic phenomenon of spin-induced orbital precession has not yet been observed in strong-field gravity. Gravitational-wave observations of binary black holes (BBHs) are prime candidates, as we expect the astrophysical binary population to contain precessing binaries. Imprints of precession have been investigated in several signals, but no definitive identification of orbital precession has been reported in any of the 84 BBH observations so far by the Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors. Here we report the measurement of strong-field precession in the LIGO–Virgo–Kagra gravitational-wave signal GW200129. The binary's orbit precesses at a rate ten orders of magnitude faster than previous weak-field measurements from binary pulsars. We also find that the primary black hole is probably highly spinning. According to current binary population estimates, a GW200129-like signal is extremely unlikely, and therefore presents a direct challenge to many current binary-formation models.

Additional Information

© 2023 Springer Nature. We thank T. Dent, S. Ghosh, E. Hamilton, P. Kolitsidou, L. London and F. Ohme for discussions; and K. Riles for guidance during the internal LIGO review process. The authors were supported in part by Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) grant ST/V00154X/1 and European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant 647839. Calculations were performed using the supercomputing facilities at Cardiff University operated by Advanced Research Computing at Cardiff (ARCCA) on behalf of the Cardiff Supercomputing Facility and the HPC Wales and Supercomputing Wales (SCW) projects. We acknowledge the support of the latter, which is part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) via the Welsh Government. In part, the computational resources at Cardiff University were also supported by STFC grant ST/I006285/1. We are also grateful for computational resources provided by LIGO Laboratory and supported by National Science Foundation Grants PHY-0757058 and PHY-0823459. This material is based on work supported by NSF's LIGO Laboratory, which is a major facility fully funded by the National Science Foundation. This research has made use of data, software and/or web tools obtained from the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center (https://www.gw-openscience.org), a service of LIGO Laboratory, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration. LIGO is funded by the US National Science Foundation. Virgo is funded by the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Italian Istituto Nazionale della Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and the Dutch Nikhef, with contributions by Polish and Hungarian institutes. Plots were prepared with Matplotlib, GWpy and PESummary. Parameter estimation was performed with the LALInference and LALSimulation libraries within LALSuite, as well as the BILBY and PBILBY libraries and the DYNESTY nested sampling package. NumPy, Scipy and Positive were used during the analysis. These authors contributed equally: Mark Hannam, Charlie Hoy, Jonathan E. Thompson. Contributions. M.H. initiated and lead the study and writing of the text. C.H. and J.E.T. performed the parameter-estimation calculations on the detector data, and the synthetic injections. J.E.T. performed the mismatch calculations. V.R. and S.F. provided valuable input to the analysis; V.R. verified the PE results and S.F. produced Fig. 3. M.H., C.H., J.E.T., S.F. and V.R. all contributed to the interpretation of the results and writing the paper. Although they did not directly contribute to the results presented here, the other authors contributed to the LVK's initial understanding of GW200129, which was the foundation of this work. Data availability. The posterior samples from the analyses performed in this work are available on Zenodo at https://zenodo.org/record/6672460. Public documentation is available at https://data.cardiffgravity.org/GW200129-precession/. The authors declare no competing interests.

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023