Parameter-Free Tour of the Binary Black Hole Population

The continued operation of the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo gravitational-wave detectors is enabling the first detailed measurements of the mass, spin, and redshift distributions of the merging binary black hole population. Our present knowledge of these distributions, however, is based largely on strongly parametric models. Such models typically assume the distributions of binary parameters to be superpositions of “building block” features like power laws, peaks, dips, and breaks. Although this approach has yielded great progress in the initial characterization of the compact binary population, the strong assumptions entailed often leave it unclear which physical conclusions are driven by observation and which by the specific choice of model. In this paper, we instead model the merger rate of binary black holes as an unknown autoregressive process over the space of binary parameters, allowing us to measure the distributions of binary black hole masses, redshifts, component spins, and effective spins with near-complete agnosticism. We find the primary mass spectrum of binary black holes to be doubly peaked, with a fairly flat continuum that steepens at high masses. We identify signs of unexpected structure in the redshift distribution of binary black holes: a uniform-in-comoving volume merger rate at low redshift followed by an increase in the merger rate beyond redshift z≈0.5. Finally, we find that the distribution of black hole spin magnitudes is unimodal and concentrated at small but nonzero values, and that spin orientations span a wide range of spin-orbit misalignment angles but are also moderately unlikely to be truly isotropic. Published by the American Physical Society 2024