Papers › The population properties of spinning black holes using Gravitational-wave Transient Catalog 3
The population properties of spinning black holes using Gravitational-wave Transient Catalog 3
Hui Tong, Shanika Galaudage, Eric Thrane
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Binary black holes formed via different pathways are predicted to have distinct spin properties. Measuring these properties with gravitational waves provides an opportunity to unveil the origins of binary black holes. Recent work draws conflicting conclusions regarding the spin distribution observed by LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA (LVK). Some analyses suggest that a fraction of the observed black-hole spin vectors are significantly misaligned (by >90°) relative to the orbital angular momentum. This has been interpreted to mean that some binaries in the LVK dataset are assembled dynamically in dense stellar environments. Other analyses find support for a sub-population of binaries with negligible spin and no evidence for significantly misaligned spin -- a result consistent with the field formation scenario. In this work, we study the spin properties of binary black holes in the third LVK gravitational-wave transient catalog. We find that there is insufficient data to resolve the existence of a sub-population of binaries with negligible black-hole spin (the presence of this sub-population is supported by a modest Bayes factor of 1.7). We find modest support for the existence of mergers with extreme spin tilt angles > 90° (the presence of extreme-tilt binaries is favored by a Bayes factor of 10.1). Only one thing is clear: at least some of the LVK binaries formed in the field. At most 89% of binaries are assembled dynamically (99\% credibility), though, the true branching fraction could be much lower, even negligible.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections