Reinterpreting Low Frequency LIGO/Virgo Events as Magnified Stellar-Mass Black Holes at Cosmological Distances

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dc.contributor.authorBroadhurst, Tom
dc.contributor.authorDiego, Jose M.
dc.contributor.authorSmoot III, George
dc.date.accessioned2019-07-20T05:59:16Z
dc.date.available2019-07-20T05:59:16Z
dc.date.issued2018-02-14
dc.descriptionEnergetic Cosmos Laboratory. ECL Publicationen_US
dc.description.abstractGravitational waves can be focussed by the gravity of an intervening galaxy, just like light, thereby magnifying binary merging events in the far Universe. High magnification by galaxies is found to be responsible for the brightest sources detected in sky surveys, but the low angular resolution of LIGO/Virgo is insufficient to check this lensing possibility directly. Here we find that the first six binary black hole (BBH) merging events reported by LIGO/Virgo show clear evidence for lensing in the plane of observed mass and source distance. The four lowest frequency events follow an apparent locus in this plane, which we can reproduce by galaxy lensing, where the higher the magnification, the generally more distant the source so the wave train is stretched more by the Universal expansion, by factors of 2-4. This revises the reported BBH distances upwards by an order of magnitude, equal to the square root of the magnification. Furthermore, the reported black hole masses must be decreased by 2-4 to counter the larger stretch factor, since the orbital frequency is used to derive the black hole masses. This lowers the masses to 5-15 solar masses, well below the puzzlingly high values of 20-35 solar masses otherwise estimated, with the attraction of finding agreement in mass with black holes orbiting stars in our own Galaxy, thereby implying a stellar origin for the low frequency events in the far Universe. We also show that the other two BBH events of higher frequency detected by LIGO/VIRGO, lie well below the lensing locus, consistent with being nearby and unlensed. If this apparent division between local and distant lensed events is reinforced by new detections then the spins and masses of stellar black holes can be compared over a timespan of 10 billion years by LIGO/Virgo.en_US
dc.identifier.citationBroadhurst, T., Diego, J.M. & Smoot III, G. (2018). Reinterpreting Low Frequency LIGO/Virgo Events as Magnified Stellar-Mass Black Holes at Cosmological Distances. The 2nd international conference of the Energetic Cosmos Laboratory (ECL) at Nazarbayev University. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.05273.pdfen_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://nur.nu.edu.kz/handle/123456789/4029
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.publisherNURIS; Energetic Cosmos Laboratoryen_US
dc.rightsAttribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States*
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/*
dc.subjectThe 2nd international conference of the Energetic Cosmos Laboratory (ECL)en_US
dc.subjectECL19en_US
dc.subjectEnergetic Cosmos Laboratory (ECL)en_US
dc.titleReinterpreting Low Frequency LIGO/Virgo Events as Magnified Stellar-Mass Black Holes at Cosmological Distancesen_US
dc.typeArticleen_US
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