Digging the population of compact binary mergers out of the noise
Abstract
Coalescing compact binaries emitting gravitational wave (GW) signals, as recently detected by the Advanced LIGO-Virgo network, constitute a population over the multidimensional 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.
- Publication:
-
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
- Pub Date:
- April 2019
- DOI:
- 10.1093/mnras/stz225
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1809.03815
- Bibcode:
- 2019MNRAS.484.4008G
- Keywords:
-
- gravitational waves;
- methods: statistical;
- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 19 pages, 12 figures