Speaker
Description
Understanding the formation channels of black hole binaries remains an open problem in gravitational-wave astronomy, made increasingly compelling by the growing catalog of detections from LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA. In this talk, I present a comparison between binaries formed through isolated (field) binary evolution and those assembled dynamically in dense environments, with particular focus on spin–orbit misalignment. For the dynamical scenario, I introduce a toy model in which black holes are paired through hierarchical interactions. In the isolated channel, I investigate how supernova kicks imparted during black hole formation can tilt the spins with respect to the orbital angular momentum. By comparing the resulting spin–orbit misalignment distributions from these two formation channels, I assess the extent to which spin orientations retain memory of their formation history and whether they can be used to distinguish between different formation pathways.
| Parallel session | Gravitational Waves from Binary Systems |
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