Characterizing Astrophysical Binary Neutron Stars with Gravitational Waves

Understand

Merging binary neutron stars are thought to be formed predominantly via isolated binary evolution.

• In this standard formation scenario, the first-born neutron star goes through a recycling process and might be rapidly spinning during the final inspiral, whereas the second-born star is expected to have effectively zero spin at merger.
• Based on this feature, we propose a new framework for the astrophysical characterization of binary neutron stars observed from their gravitational wave emission.
• We further propose a prior for the dimensionless spins of recycled neutron stars, given by a gamma distribution with a shape parameter of 2 and a scale parameter of 0.012, extrapolated from radio pulsar observations of Galactic binary neutron stars.