Despite the rapidly growing number of stellar-mass binary black hole mergers discovered through gravitational waves, the origin of these binaries is still not known. In galactic centers, black holes ...can be brought to each others' proximity by dynamical processes, resulting in mergers. It is also possible that black holes formed in previous mergers encounter new black holes, resulting in so-called hierarchical mergers. Hierarchical events carry signatures such as higher-than-usual black hole mass and spin. Here we show that the recently reported gravitational-wave candidate, GW170817A, could be the result of such a hierarchical merger. In particular, its chirp mass ∼40 M and effective spin of χeff ∼ 0.5 are the typically expected values from hierarchical mergers within the disks of active galactic nuclei. We find that the reconstructed parameters of GW170817A strongly favor a hierarchical merger origin over having been produced by an isolated binary origin (with an odds ratio of > 103).
The time-frequency transforms are important tools for identification of transient events in the output of the gravitational-wave detectors. Produced by the terrestrial and possibly by astrophysical ...sources, the transient events can be identified as patterns on the time-frequency plane with the excess power above stationary detector noise. In this paper we consider a particular case of the Wilson-Daubechies time-frequency transform for use in the gravitational-wave burst analysis. The presented Wilson-Daubechies basis shares some properties with the Gabor frames, but circumvents the Balian-Low theorem. It also shares similarity with the Meyer wavelet, which is actively used in the gravitational-wave burst analysis. The main advantages of the Wilson-Daubechies transform are the low computational cost, spectral leakage control, flexible structure of the frequency sub-bands, and the existence of the analytic time-delay filters, which are important for localization of the gravitational-wave sources in the sky. These properties of the Wilson-Daubechies transform may prove useful not only in the transient analysis, but also in other areas of the gravitational wave data analysis and detector characterization.
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