The 2017 paper Are merging black holes born from stellar collapse or previous mergers? that I co-authored with Davide Gerosa was selected for the 2025 Frontiers of Science Award by the International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS), sponsored by the City of Beijing and the Yanqi Lake Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Application (BIMSA).
The complete list of physics papers selected for awards is available here. Our paper is one of three that were selected in the category Astrophysics and Cosmology - Theory.
Frontiers of Science Award recipients are invited to the ICBS to accept the award in person at the Great Hall of People of China in Beijing. The total value of an FSA is USD 25,000 before tax, shared by authors of the winning paper(s).
Our paper was published in Physical Review D in 2017, selected as an Editor’s Suggestion, and discussed in an article by Chris Lee in Ars Technica.
Here is the abstract:
Advanced LIGO detectors at Hanford and Livingston made two confirmed and one marginal detection of binary black holes during their first observing run. The first event, GW150914, was from the merger of two black holes much heavier that those whose masses have been estimated so far, indicating a formation scenario that might differ from “ordinary” stellar evolution. One possibility is that these heavy black holes resulted from a previous merger. When the progenitors of a black hole binary merger result from previous mergers, they should (on average) merge later, be more massive, and have spin magnitudes clustered around a dimensionless spin ~0.7. Here we ask the following question: can gravitational-wave observations determine whether merging black holes were born from the collapse of massive stars (“first generation”), rather than being the end product of earlier mergers (“second generation”)? We construct simple, observationally motivated populations of black hole binaries, and we use Bayesian model selection to show that measurements of the masses, luminosity distance (or redshift), and “effective spin” of black hole binaries can indeed distinguish between these different formation scenarios.
The cartoon below illustrates the main idea.
