Gravitational-Wave Data Analysis with High-Precision Numerical Relativity Simulations of Boson Star Mergers

Creators: Evstafyeva, Tamara¹; Sperhake, Ulrich^{1, 2}; Romero-Shaw, Isobel M.¹; Agathos, Michalis¹

1. University of Cambridge
2. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Gravitational-wave signals detected to date are commonly interpreted under the paradigm that they originate from pairs of black holes or neutron stars. Here, we explore the alternative scenario of boson-star signals being present in the data stream. We perform accurate and long (∼20 orbits) numerical simulations of boson-star binaries and inject the resulting strain into LIGO noise. Our Bayesian inference reveals that some boson-star signals are degenerate with current approximants, albeit with biased parameters, while others exhibit smoking-gun signatures leaving behind conspicuous residuals.

Copyright and License

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Acknowledgement

We thank Priscilla Canizares and Christopher J. Moore for fruitful discussions on GW analysis and the GRTL collaboration [69]. T. E. is supported by the Centre for Doctoral Training at the University of Cambridge funded through STFC. I. M. R.-S. acknowledges support from the Herchel Smith Postdoctoral Fellowship Fund. This work has been supported by STFC Research Grant No. ST/V005669/1. We acknowledge support by the NSF Grants No. PHY-090003, No. PHY-1626190, and No. PHY-2110594, DiRAC projects ACTP284 and ACTP238, STFC capital Grants No. ST/P002307/1, No. ST/R002452/1, No. ST/I006285/1, and No. ST/V005618/1, STFC operations Grant No. ST/R00689X/1. Computations were done on the CSD3 and Fawcett (Cambridge), Cosma (Durham), Hawk (Cardiff), CIT LIGO Lab (Pasadena), Stampede2 (TACC), and Expanse (SDSC) clusters.

Data Availability

Our data and animations are publicly available [70–72].

Supplemental Material

This supplementary material contains details of our numerical convergence tests, specifics about the inference setup and samplers used, a comparison between boson-star and black-hole waveforms, and a complete table of our signal injections and recoveries.

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PhysRevLett.133.131401.pdf

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