The challenge of interpreting high-mass compact mergers: from black holes to boson stars

• Juan calderon bustillo

Gravitational-wave astronomy has delivered around 90 confirmed observations of compact mergers. Among these, the signal GW190521 marked the first observation of a black hole in the intermediate-mass range. While extremely profitable from a scientific perspective, signals from such high-mass mergers are extremely difficult to both detect and interpret. While these are the loudest sources for LIGO and Virgo, only one such signal has been observed to date, admitting a wide variety of interpretations. In this talk I will first review the challenges that high-mass systems involve from a data analysis perspective. Next, I will present a systematic comparison of high-mass events from LIGO/Virgo to numerically simulated signals from boson star mergers. I will show that GW190521 is highly consistent with such a boson-star merger and discuss possible paths forward to pursue the detection of these objects.