Data Release: "No evidence that the majority of black holes in binaries have zero spin"

<p>This dataset contains the results presented in&nbsp;&quot;<em>No evidence that the majority of black holes in binaries have zero spin</em>&quot;.</p> <p>In this paper, we systematically explored the effective and component spin distributions of binary black holes among the LIGO/Virgo GWTC-3 catalog.&nbsp;In particular, we tried to answer the following core questions, which have been the subject of active exploration and some debate in the literature:</p> <p><em>1. Is there an excess of binary black holes with vanishing spin, as predicted by some theories of angular momentum transport in stellar cores?</em></p> <p><strong>We find no evidence for an excess of vanishing spin systems.</strong>&nbsp;This finding is confirmed by three complementary analyses: one relying only on the Bayes factors between spinning and non-spinning priors for each BBH observation,&nbsp;one that seeks to model the distribution of effective aligned spins,&nbsp;and one modeling the distribution of component spin magnitudes and misalignment angles.&nbsp;Instead, we find BBH spin magnitudes to be consistent with a single, continuous distribution that remains finite at magnitude zero.</p> <p><em>2. Do there exist binaries with component spins misaligned by more than 90 degrees relative to their orbits?</em></p> <p><strong>We find a strong preference for the existence of such strongly misaligned spins.</strong>&nbsp;Our analysis of the BBH component spin distribution indicates that at least some component spins are misaligned from their orbits by more than 90 degrees.&nbsp;This result is robust under a variety of modeling choices regarding both the distribution of component spin magnitudes and tilts.</p> <p>The code used to generate this data can be found in the&nbsp;repository&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/tcallister/gwtc3-spin-studies/">https://github.com/tcallister/gwtc3-spin-studies/</a>. This repository includes <a href="https://github.com/tcallister/gwtc3-spin-studies/tree/main/data">jupyter notebooks</a> that can be used to open, explore, and plot the files contained in this data set. Additional information about reproducing and/or using this dataset can be found in <a href="https://tcallister.github.io/gwtc3-spin-studies/build/html/index.html">our associated documentation</a>.</p> <p>Further notes:</p> <ul> <li>The files <em>sampleDict_FAR_1_in_1_yr.pickle</em>&nbsp;and <em>injectionDict_FAR_1_in_1.pickle</em>, used as inputs to our analyses, are created via code in the repository&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/tcallister/get-lvk-data">https://github.com/tcallister/get-lvk-data</a> (see also&nbsp;<a href="https://zenodo.org/record/6505409">https://zenodo.org/record/6505409</a>).</li> <li>The file&nbsp;<em>posteriors_gaussian_spin_samples_FAR_1_in_1.json</em>, used for figure generation, was published by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, Virgo Collaboration, and KAGRA Collaboration in support of the paper &quot;<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.03634">The population of merging compact binaries inferred using gravitational waves through GWTC-3</a>&quot; (see&nbsp;<a href="https://zenodo.org/record/5655785">https://zenodo.org/record/5655785</a>).</li> </ul>