Discovering the mass gap: Analyzing mass-gap black hole objects through gravitational waves
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.58445/rars.3074Keywords:
Astrophysics, black holes, Mass gap, Bayesian StatisticsAbstract
Mass gap objects have eluded researchers for many years, as they occupy the space between the lightest black holes and the heaviest neutron stars. The purpose of this study was to use gravitational wave analysis emitted by the process of forming these objects to gain a deeper understanding of their properties and general trends. We hypothesized that mass-gap mergers differed from other black hole mergers primarily by their chirp-mass distribution, spin, and effective spin distributions, which was partially proven correct when the chirp mass of mass gap mergers was estimated to be very different from black hole mergers. However, nested sampling and kernel density estimation revealed that the spin and effective spins of mass gap objects do not differ significantly from those of black holes, which is a fascinating result that will help further research in the future.
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