BBH-Genesis: Disentangling Binary Black Hole Formation Channels with GWTC-4
- 1Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics , Tata Institute of Fundamental Research , Homi Bhabha Road , Navy Nagar , Colaba , Mumbai 400005 , India
Abstract
The detected population of binary black holes (BBHs) from the gravitational wave (GW) data has made it possible to decipher their formation and evolution history over cosmic time. The complexity of astrophysical modeling of binary mergers makes it challenging to predict key signatures for different formation channels. As a result, one of the major avenues to discover the presence of different channels from detected GW events is through a data-driven way which can isolate different scenarios. In this spirit, we developed a new inference pipeline BBH-Genesis and applied it on the fourth GW catalog (GWTC-4) to identify the presence of multiple underlying distinct populations. We find that the current population of all the binary events in GWTC-4 can be explained with the strongest evidence for only a two-channel scenario, hinting at the presence of a non-isolated binary formation channel. This sub-population can be further divided into a third channel with mild support towards formation in AGN exhibiting a slightly different effective spin and mass ratio correlation. In the future, with the detection of more events, it will be clearer whether it is necessary to consider at least three channels to explain the BBH events detected using GW observations.
Related
- Compactness Peaks and Subpopulations: Probing Stellar Physics and Formation Channels of Merging Binary Black Holes
- Hostbusters: constraining H0 and binary formation channels through gravitational-wave host galaxy associations
- On the Astrophysical Origin of Binary Black Hole Subpopulations: A Tale of Three Channels?
- Physics-based phenomenological modeling of binary black hole hierarchical formation 2: Autodifferentiable functional inference of hierarchical compact-binary populations
- Physics-based phenomenological modeling of binary black hole hierarchical formation 1: Synthetic universes from globular cluster simulations for GWTC
BibTeX
@misc{padhyegurjar2026bbhgenesis,
title = {{BBH-Genesis: Disentangling Binary Black Hole Formation Channels with GWTC-4}},
author = {Shaunak Padhyegurjar and Suvodip Mukherjee},
howpublished = {arXiv (Cornell University)},
year = {2026},
month = may,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2606.00234},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00234},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - BBH-Genesis: Disentangling Binary Black Hole Formation Channels with GWTC-4
AU - Shaunak Padhyegurjar
AU - Suvodip Mukherjee
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/05/29
PB - arXiv (Cornell University)
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2606.00234
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00234
AB - The detected population of binary black holes (BBHs) from the gravitational wave (GW) data has made it possible to decipher their formation and evolution history over cosmic time. The complexity of astrophysical modeling of binary mergers makes it challenging to predict key signatures for different formation channels. As a result, one of the major avenues to discover the presence of different channels from detected GW events is through a data-driven way which can isolate different scenarios. In this spirit, we developed a new inference pipeline BBH-Genesis and applied it on the fourth GW catalog (GWTC-4) to identify the presence of multiple underlying distinct populations. We find that the current population of all the binary events in GWTC-4 can be explained with the strongest evidence for only a two-channel scenario, hinting at the presence of a non-isolated binary formation channel. This sub-population can be further divided into a third channel with mild support towards formation in AGN exhibiting a slightly different effective spin and mass ratio correlation. In the future, with the detection of more events, it will be clearer whether it is necessary to consider at least three channels to explain the BBH events detected using GW observations.
SN - 2331-8422
ER -