Things that might go bump in the night: Assessing structure in the binary black hole mass spectrum

Understand

Several features in the mass spectrum of merging binary black holes (BBHs) have been identified using data from the Third Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC-3).

• These features are of particular interest as they may encode the uncertain mechanism of BBH formation.
• We assess if the features are statistically significant or the result of Poisson noise due to the finite number of observed events.
• We simulate catalogs of BBHs whose underlying distribution does not have the features of interest, apply the analysis previously performed on GWTC-3, and determine how often such features are spuriously found.