Searching for mass-spin correlations in the population of gravitational-wave events: the GWTC-3 case study

Understand

One fundamental goal of the newly born gravitational wave astronomy is discovering the origin of the observed binary black hole mergers.

• Towards this end, identifying features in the growing wealth of data may help in distinguishing different formation pathways.
• While large uncertainties still affect the binary formation models, spin-mass relations remain characteristic features of specific classes of channels.
• By focusing on the effective inspiral spin $\chi_\text{eff}$, the best reconstructed spin-related merger parameter, we show that current GWTC-3 data support the hypothesis that a fraction of events may display mass-spin correlations similar to one expected by dynamical formation channels of either astrophysical or primordial nature.