Speaker
Description
All Gravitational Wave signals detected so far were generated by the coalescence of black holes and/or neutron stars in binary systems. Correctly identifying the primary and secondary objects within said systems is crucial to obtain unbiased astrophysical information regarding their masses and spins; as of now, labels are assigned on a mass basis: the "primary" label is given to the more massive object, and vice versa.
This choice carries an inherent assumption that can result in unaccounted for labelling uncertainties, especially in cases where the masses of the two objects are comparable.
An alternative to this a priori labelling choice comes in the form of an a posteriori approach (Gerosa et al. 2025), through which posterior samples from a single GW signal are grouped by means of a clustering algorithm; the two objects thus identified are then labelled according to the median of the respective masses.
The aim of this work is to extend this novel approach to the analysis of populations of compact objects; specifically, the same a posteriori procedure is applied to samples that are representative of a population of compact objects and the resulting mass distributions (relative to the primary and secondary objects) are compared to those found in the existing literature. We make use of a variety of mass distribution models to generate the set of population samples, including a non-parametric one and two parametric models that are invariant under mass relabelling.
| Parallel session | Gravitational Waves from Binary Systems |
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