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Constraints from gravitational wave detections of binary black hole mergers on the $^{12}\rm{C}\left(\alpha,\gamma\right)^{16}\!\rm{O}$ rate by Farmer, Robert; Renzo, Mathieu; de Mink, Selma; Fishbach, Maya; Justham, Stephen is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Constraints from gravitational wave detections of binary black hole mergers on the $^{12}\rm{C}\left(\alpha,\gamma\right)^{16}\!\rm{O}$ rate about?

Gravitational wave detections are starting to allow us to probe the physical processes in the evolution of very massive stars through the imprints they leave on their final remnants. Stellar evolution theory predicts the existence of a gap in the black hole mass distribution at high mass due to the effects of pair-instability. Previously, we showed that the location of the gap is robust against model uncertainties, but it does depend sensitively on the uncertain $^{12}\rm{C}\left(\alpha,\gamma\right)^{16}\!\rm{O}$ rate. This rate is of great astrophysical significance and governs the production of oxygen at the expense of carbon. We use the open source MESA stellar evolution code to evolve massive helium stars to probe the location of the mass gap. We find that the maximum black hole mass below the gap varies between $40\rm{M}_\odot$ to $90\rm{M}_\odot$, depending on the strength of the uncertain $^{12}\rm{C}\left(\alpha,\gamma\right)^{16}\!\rm{O}$ reaction rate. With the first ten gravitational-wave detections of black holes, we constrain the astrophysical S-factor for $^{12}\rm{C}\left(\alpha,\gamma\right)^{16}\!\rm{O}$, at $300\rm{keV}$, to $S_{300}>175\rm{\,keV\, barns}$ at 68%

Author

Farmer, Robert; Renzo, Mathieu; de Mink, Selma; Fishbach, Maya; Justham, Stephen

Published

2020

Language

EN