| Issue |
A&A
Volume 666, October 2022
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | A174 | |
| Number of page(s) | 16 | |
| Section | Astrophysical processes | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202243260 | |
| Published online | 24 October 2022 | |
Constraints on the merging binary neutron star mass distribution and equation of state based on the incidence of jets in the population⋆
1
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Dip. di Fisica “G. Occhialini”, piazza della Scienza 3, 20126 Milano (MI), Italy
e-mail: omsharan.salafia@gmail.com
2
INFN – Sezione di Milano-Bicocca, piazza della Scienza 2, 20126 Milano (MI), Italy
3
INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Via E. Bianchi 46, 23807 Merate (LC), Italy
4
Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA), Via Bonomea 265, 34136 Trieste (TS), Italy
5
Monash Centre for Astrophysics, School of Physics and Astronomy, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia
6
ARC Center of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery – OzGrav, Hawthorn, Australia
7
Institute of Gravitational Wave Astronomy and School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
Received:
3
February
2022
Accepted:
1
August
2022
A relativistic jet has been produced in the single well-localised binary neutron star (BNS) merger detected to date in gravitational waves (GWs), and the local rates of BNS mergers and short gamma-ray bursts are of the same order of magnitude. This suggests that jet formation is not a rare outcome for BNS mergers, and we show that this intuition can be turned into a quantitative constraint: at least about one-third of GW-detected BNS mergers and at least about one-fifth of all BNS mergers should produce a successful jet (90% credible level). Whether a jet is launched depends on the properties of the merger remnant and of the surrounding accretion disc, which in turn are a function of the progenitor binary masses and equation of state (EoS). The incidence of jets in the population therefore carries information about the binary component mass distribution and EoS. Under the assumption that a jet can only be produced by a black hole remnant surrounded by a non-negligible accretion disc, we show how the jet incidence can be used to place a joint constraint on the space of BNS component mass distributions and EoS. The result points to a broad mass distribution, with particularly strong support for masses in the 1.3 − 1.6 M⊙ range. The constraints on the EoS are shallow, but we show how they will tighten as the knowledge on the jet incidence improves. We also discuss how to extend the method to include future BNS mergers, with possibly uncertain jet associations.
Key words: gravitational waves / gamma-ray burst: general / stars: neutron / pulsars: general / stars: luminosity function, mass function / relativistic processes
The source code of the manuscript and that used to produce all figures is publicly available at https://github.com/omsharansalafia/bns_jet_incidence_public
© O. S. Salafia et al. 2022
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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