Kavli Affiliate: Daniel E. Holz
| First 5 Authors: Amanda M. Farah, Bruce Edelman, Michael Zevin, Maya Fishbach, Jose María Ezquiaga
| Summary:
Several features in the mass spectrum of merging binary black holes (BBHs)
have been identified using data from the Third Gravitational Wave Transient
Catalog (GWTC-3). These features are of particular interest as they may encode
the uncertain mechanism of BBH formation. We assess if the features are
statistically significant or the result of Poisson noise due to the finite
number of observed events. We simulate catalogs of BBHs whose underlying
distribution does not have the features of interest, apply the analysis
previously performed on GWTC-3, and determine how often such features are
spuriously found. We find that one of the features found in GWTC-3, the peak at
$sim35,M_{odot}$, cannot be explained by Poisson noise alone: peaks as
significant occur in $1.7%$ of catalogs generated from a featureless
population. This peak is therefore likely to be of astrophysical origin. The
data is suggestive of an additional significant peak at $sim10,M_{odot}$,
though the exact location of this feature is not resolvable with current
observations. Additional structure beyond a power law, such as the purported
dip at $sim14,M_{odot}$, can be explained by Poisson noise. We also provide
a publicly-available package, texttt{GWMockCat}, that creates simulated
catalogs of BBH events with correlated measurement uncertainty and selection
effects according to user-specified underlying distributions and detector
sensitivities.
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