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arXiv · 1809.03815

Digging the population of compact binary mergers out of the noise

Sebastian M. Gaebel·John Veitch·Thomas Dent·Will M. Farr
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Abstract

Coalescing compact binaries emitting gravitational wave (GW) signals, as recently detected by the Advanced LIGO-Virgo network, constitute a population over the multi-dimensional space of component masses and spins, redshift, and other parameters. Characterizing this population is a major goal of GW observations and may be approached via parametric models. We demonstrate hierarchical inference for such models with a method that accounts for uncertainties in each binary merger's individual parameters, for mass-dependent selection effects, and also for the presence of a second population of candidate events caused by detector noise. Thus, the method is robust to potential biases from a contaminated sample and allows us to extract information from events that have a relatively small probability of astrophysical origin.

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Sebastian M. Gaebel, John Veitch, Thomas Dent, Will M. Farr. 2018-09-11. Digging the population of compact binary mergers out of the noise. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras%2Fstz225

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