Understand
The first detected gravitational wave signal, GW150914, was produced by the coalescence of a stellar-mass binary black hole.
- Along with the subsequent detection of GW151226, GW170104 and the candidate event LVT151012, this gives us evidence for a population of black hole binaries with component masses in the tens of solar masses.
- As detector sensitivity improves, this type of source is expected to make a large contribution to the overall number of detections, but has received little attention compared to binary neutron star systems in studies of projected network performance.
- We simulate the observation of a system like GW150914 with different proposed network configurations, and study the precision of parameter estimates, particularly source location, orientation and masses.