Mimicking Mergers: Mistaking Black Hole Captures as Mergers

Understand

As the number of gravitational wave observations has increased in recent years, the variety of sources has broadened.

• Here we investigate whether it is possible for the current generation of detectors to distinguish between very short-lived gravitational wave signals from mergers between high-mass black holes, and the signal produced by a close encounter between two black holes which results in gravitational capture, and ultimately a merger.
• We compare the posterior probability distributions produced by analysing simulated signals from both types of progenitor events, both under ideal and realistic scenarios.
• We show that while, under ideal conditions it is possible to distinguish both progenitors, under more realistic conditions they are indistinguishable.