The most luminous AGN do not produce the majority of the detected stellar-mass black hole binary mergers in the local Universe

Understand

Despite the increasing number of Gravitational Wave (GW) detections, the astrophysical origin of Binary Black Hole (BBH) mergers remains elusive.

• A promising formation channel for BBHs is inside accretion discs around supermassive black holes, that power Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN).
• In this paper, we test for the first time the spatial correlation between observed GW events and AGN.
• To this end, we assemble all sky catalogues with 1,412 (242) AGN with a bolometric luminosity greater than $10^{45.5} {\rm erg\ s}^{-1}$ ($10^{46}\,{\rm erg\,s}^{-1}$) with spectroscopic redshift of $z\leq0.3$ from the Milliquas catalogue, version 7.7b.