Kavli Affiliate: Salvatore Vitale
| First 5 Authors: Salvatore Vitale, Sylvia Biscoveanu, Colm Talbot, ,
| Summary:
It is expected that the orbital planes of gravitational-wave (GW) sources are
isotropically distributed. However, both physical and technical factors, such
as alternate theories of gravity with birefringence, catalog contamination, and
search algorithm limitations, could result in inferring a non-isotropic
distribution. Showing that the inferred astrophysical distribution of the
orbital orientations is indeed isotropic can thus be used to rule out some
violations of general relativity, as a null test about the purity of the GW
catalog sample, and as a check that selection effects are being properly
accounted for. We augment the default mass/spins/redshift model used by the
LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration in their most recent analysis to also measure
the astrophysical distribution of orbital orientations. We show that the 69
binary black holes in GWTC-3 are consistent with having random orbital
orientations. The inferred distribution is highly symmetric around $pi/2$,
with skewness $mathcal{S}_{rm{post}}=0.01^{+0.17}_{-0.17}$. Meanwhile, the
median of the inferred distribution has a Jensen-Shannon divergence of
$1.4times 10^{-4}$ bits when compared to the expected isotropic distribution.
| Search Query: ArXiv Query: search_query=au:”Salvatore Vitale”&id_list=&start=0&max_results=10