Observed Gravitational-Wave Populations

Abstract

Ground-based gravitational-wave detectors like the Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo, and KAGRA experiments now regularly witness gravitational waves from compact binary mergers: the relativistic collisions of neutron stars and/or stellar-mass black holes. With hundreds of such events observed to date, gravitational-wave observations are enabling increasingly precise surveys of the demographics of merging compact binaries, including the distributions of their masses, rotation rates, and positions throughout the Universe. This article will provide an overview of our observational knowledge of the compact binary population, as it stands today. I will discuss, in turn, observations of binary black holes, binary neutron stars, and neutron star-black hole mergers, describing what is currently known (or not yet known) about these different gravitational-wave sources. I will highlight emerging classes of binaries that do not fall cleanly into any of these existing categories. And I will conclude by reviewing the methodology by which population analyses of gravitational-wave sources are performed.