Abstract
The LIGO-Virgo analyses of signals from compact binary mergers observed so far have assumed isolated binary systems in a vacuum, neglecting the potential presence of astrophysical environments. We present here the first investigation of environmental effects on each of the events of GWTC-1 and two low-mass events from GWTC-2. We find no evidence for the presence of environmental effects. Most of the events decisively exclude the scenario of dynamical fragmentation of massive stars as their formation channel. GW170817 results in the most stringent upper bound on the medium density (≲21 g/cm3). We find that environmental effects can substantially bias the recovered parameters in the vacuum model, even when these effects are not detectable. We forecast that the Einstein Telescope and B-DECIGO will be able to probe the environmental effects of accretion disks and superradiant boson clouds on compact binaries.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 251401 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Physical Review Letters |
| Volume | 132 |
| Issue number | 25 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 21 Jun 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2024 American Physical Society.
Funding
We gratefully acknowledge comments and feedback from Nathan Johnson-McDaniel and Stefano Rinaldi. We are grateful to Marc Andr & cacute;s-Carcasona for useful discus-sions throughout the preparation of the paper. We also thank the anonymous referee for the useful comments and suggestions. This research has made use of data or software obtained from the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center, a service of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the Virgo Collaboration, and KAGRA. This material is based upon work supported by NSF's LIGO Laboratory which is a major facility fully funded by the National Science Foundation, 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. Virgo is funded, through the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), by the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), and the Dutch Nikhef, with contributions by institutions from Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, and Spain. KAGRA. is supported by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) in Japan; National Research Foundation (NRF) and Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) in Korea; Academia Sinica (AS) and National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) in Taiwan. The authors are grateful for computational resources provided by the LIGO Laboratory and supported by National Science Foundation Grants No. PHY-0757058 and No. PHY-0823459. S. R. and M. H. were supported by the research program of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) . R. V. is supported by Grant No. FJC2021-046551-I funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR. R. V. also acknowledges support by Grant No. CERN/FIS-PAR/0023/2019. This paper has been given LIGO DCC No. LIGO-P2300301. This work is partially supported by the Spanish MCIN/AEI under Grants No. SEV-2016-0588, No. PGC2018-101858-B-I00, and No. PID2020 - 113701 GB-I00, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. I. F. A. E. is partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. To generate the waveforms, we have used the LALSimulation package of the LIGO Algorithms Library (LAL) software suite [116] . To perform the Bayesian parameter estimation analyses, we have used the nested sampling algorithm [117 - 119] implemented in the LALInference [120] and BILBY [121] packages to evaluate the integral over the model parameter space and calculate the Bayes factor. We have used NumPy [122] and SciPy [123] for analyses in the manuscript.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Australian Research Council | |
| National Science Foundation | |
| Science and Technology Facilities Council | |
| Japan Society for the Promotion of Science | |
| Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación | |
| Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare | |
| Generalitat de Catalunya | |
| Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare | |
| Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique | |
| European Union NextGenerationEU | |
| European Commission | |
| Academia Sinica | |
| National Research Foundation | |
| Ministry of Science and ICT | |
| European Regional Development Fund | |
| Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology | |
| PRTR | CERN/FIS-PAR/0023/2019 |
| Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek | MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, FJC2021-046551-I |
| National Science and Technology Council | PHY-0823459, PHY-0757058 |
| Agencia Estatal de Investigación | SEV-2016-0588, PGC2018-101858-B-I00, PID2020–113701 GB-I00 |