Statistical and systematic uncertainties in extracting the source properties of neutron star - black hole binaries with gravitational waves

Understand

Gravitational waves emitted by neutron star black hole mergers encode key properties of neutron stars - such as their size, maximum mass and spins - and black holes.

• However, the presence of matter and the high mass ratio makes generating long and accurate waveforms from these systems hard to do with numerical relativity, and not much is known about systematic uncertainties due to waveform modeling.
• We simulate gravitational waves from neutron star black hole mergers by hybridizing numerical relativity waveforms produced with the SpEC code with a recent numerical relativity surrogate NRHybSur3dq8Tidal.
• These signals are analyzed using a range of available waveform families, and statistical and systematic errors are reported.