A Collapsar-Disk Origin for GW190814
Abstract
GW190814 was a remarkable gravitational-wave (GW) event: a merger between a 23 M⊙ black hole (BH) and a 2.6 M⊙ compact object, with an extreme mass ratio that is difficult to reproduce through standard isolated-binary or dynamical formation channels. Recent work has shown that neutrino-cooled collapsar disks can become gravitationally unstable and fragment, producing neutron stars (NSs) or low-mass BHs in orbit around the newly formed central BH. These fragments may subsequently interact, scatter, merge with one another, or inspiral into the central remnant. We explore the possibility that GW190814 originated from such a collapsar-disk fragment merging with the central BH. A key prediction of this scenario is a temporal association with a stripped-envelope supernova preceding the GW event, and we identify the Type Ib supernova candidate SN2019npv, which occurred inside the GW190814 credible volume approximately 60 days before coalescence, as a possible electromagnetic precursor. Although this delay is too long for a conventional kilonova counterpart, we show that three-body interactions among disk fragments can excite some compact objects to wide orbits and produce merger delays of weeks to months. While GW190814 itself was not expected to produce detectable tidal-disruption-powered emission, future delayed mergers in this channel could generate luminous transients through either reprocessed kilonova heating or shocks driven as merger ejecta collide with the preceding supernova ejecta. Finally, treating SN2019npv as the electromagnetic counterpart makes GW190814 a bright standard siren and yields H0 = 71.1+9.3−7.5 km s−1Mpc−1.
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BibTeX
@misc{baibhav2026collapsardisk,
title = {{A Collapsar-Disk Origin for GW190814}},
author = {Vishal Baibhav and Brian D. Metzger and Lam Hui},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2606.23786},
eprint = {2606.23786},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23786},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A Collapsar-Disk Origin for GW190814
AU - Vishal Baibhav
AU - Brian D. Metzger
AU - Lam Hui
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/02
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2606.23786
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23786
AB - GW190814 was a remarkable gravitational-wave (GW) event: a merger between a 23 M_⊙ black hole (BH) and a 2.6 M_⊙ compact object, with an extreme mass ratio that is difficult to reproduce through standard isolated-binary or dynamical formation channels. Recent work has shown that neutrino-cooled collapsar disks can become gravitationally unstable and fragment, producing neutron stars (NSs) or low-mass BHs in orbit around the newly formed central BH. These fragments may subsequently interact, scatter, merge with one another, or inspiral into the central remnant. We explore the possibility that GW190814 originated from such a collapsar-disk fragment merging with the central BH. A key prediction of this scenario is a temporal association with a stripped-envelope supernova preceding the GW event, and we identify the Type Ib supernova candidate SN2019npv, which occurred inside the GW190814 credible volume approximately 60 days before coalescence, as a possible electromagnetic precursor. Although this delay is too long for a conventional kilonova counterpart, we show that three-body interactions among disk fragments can excite some compact objects to wide orbits and produce merger delays of weeks to months. While GW190814 itself was not expected to produce detectable tidal-disruption-powered emission, future delayed mergers in this channel could generate luminous transients through either reprocessed kilonova heating or shocks driven as merger ejecta collide with the preceding supernova ejecta. Finally, treating SN2019npv as the electromagnetic counterpart makes GW190814 a bright standard siren and yields H_0 = 71.1^+9.3_−7.5 km s^−1Mpc^−1.
ER -