Conveners
Exploring the Black Hole Mass Gap: Block 1
- Grant Mathews (University of Notre)
Description
The pair instability supernova in massive is believed to preclude the formation of black holes in the range of 50-120 solar masses. Nevertheless, recent detections suggest the existence of black holes with masses well inside the "mass gap". A flurry of ideas have emerged to explain the existence of black holes in the mass gap. This session will include talks summarizing various approaches to this dilemma.
We studied the formation of GW190521-like binary black holes (BHs) from Population (Pop) III binary stars by binary population synthesis technique. We adopted two kinds of Pop III star evolution models with different convective overshoot parameters, both of which can reproduce solar-metallicity star evolution if we change only metallicity from zero metallicity to the solar metallcity. We found...
Stellar theory predicts the existence of a black hole mass gap in the range ~50 to ~120 solar masses resulting from pair instability supernovae. The binary black holes of LIGO-Virgo's first two observing runs supported this prediction, showing evidence for a dearth of component black hole masses above 45 solar masses. Meanwhile, among the 30+ new observations from the third observing run,...
In this talk we present a re-analysis of high mass gravitational-wave events with posterior support in or near the pair-instability supernova (PISN) mass gap with state-of-art phenomenological waveform models, IMRPhenomX and IMRPhenomT, One particularly interesting event is GW190521 - the most massive binary observed to data, with only a few observable wave cycles. We discuss challenges in...
LIGO/Virgo Collaboration reported the detection of the most massive BH-BH merger up to date with component masses of 85+66 Msun. Motivated by recent observations of massive stars and employing newly estimated uncertainties on pulsational pair-instability mass-loss we show that it is trivial to form such massive BH-BH mergers through the classical isolated binary evolution (with no assistance...
The LIGO/Virgo collaboration is making astonishing discoveries at a fantastic pace, including a heavy binary black hole merger with component masses in the “black hole mass gap,” which cannot be explained by standard stellar structure theory. In this talk, I will discuss how new light particles that couple to the Standard Model can act as an additional source of energy loss in the cores of...
If an astrophysical environment is hot enough, screening in the associated nuclear reactions can be modified by the presence of a relativistic electron-positron plasma. Additionally, strong magnetic fields can create an additional enhancement as the electron and positron energy distribution is modified by the altered Landau level occupancy. This can result in a further enhancement of nuclear...
Models of the evolution of stars with initial masses of approximately $80 - 240 M_\odot$ include instability due to the production of electron positron pairs in some portion of the star. The resulting supernovae do not leave behind a black hole remnant, meaning that no black holes in the mass range $50-120 M_\odot$ are expected to form. However, a fundamental assumption in these models is that...
