Papers › Deep follow-up for gravitational-wave inference: a case study with GW151226
Deep follow-up for gravitational-wave inference: a case study with GW151226
Avi Vajpeyi, Rory Smith, Eric Thrane
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New analyses of gravitational wave events raise questions about the nature of some events. For example, LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA initially determined GW151226 to be a merger with a mass-ratio q≈0.5 and effective inspiral spin χ_(eff)≈0.2. However, recent works offer an alternative picture: GW151226 is a lower-mass-ratio event q ≈0.3 with slightly higher spin χ_(eff)≈0.3. This discrepancy has been challenging to resolve as a wide range of differences are employed for each analysis. This work introduces a ``deep follow-up'' framework to efficiently compute the posterior odds between two different peaks in parameter space. In doing so, we aim to help resolve disputes about the true nature of gravitational-wave events associated with conflicting astrophysical interpretations. Our proposal is not a replacement for standard inference techniques; instead, our method provides a diagnostic tool to understand discrepancies between conflicting results. We demonstrate this method by studying three {q-χ_(eff)} peaks proposed for GW151226. We find the (q∼0.5, χ_(eff)∼0.2) interpretation is only slightly preferred over the (q∼0.3, χ_(eff)∼0.3) hypothesis with a posterior odds of ∼1.7±0.4, suggesting that neither of the two peaks can be ruled out. We discuss strategies to produce more reliable parameter estimation studies in gravitational-wave astronomy.
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