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Free keywords:
Astrophysics, High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, astro-ph.HE, Astrophysics, Solar and Stellar Astrophysics, astro-ph.SR,General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, gr-qc
Abstract:
Recent detections of gravitational waves from merging binary black holes
opened new possibilities to study the evolution of massive stars and black hole
formation. In particular, stellar evolution models may be constrained on the
basis of the differences in the predicted distribution of black hole masses and
redshifts. In this work we propose a framework that combines galaxy and stellar
evolution models and use it to predict the detection rates of merging binary
black holes by Advanced LIGO. A qualitative comparison of several stellar
evolution models shows that they differ by the total number of detectable
events, and in some cases exhibit model-specific features in the mass
distribution, such as peaks and cutoffs. These features, together with the
mass-redshift distribution, can be used to discriminate between various stellar
evolution models when the number of detected mergers increases.
