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General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, gr-qc
Abstract:
The era of gravitational-wave astronomy has started with the discovery of the
binary black hole coalescences (BBH) GW150914 and GW151226 by the LIGO
instruments. These systems allowed for the first direct measurement of masses
and spins of black holes. The component masses in each of the systems have been
estimated with uncertainties of over 10\%, with only weak constraints on the
spin magnitude and orientation. In this paper we show how these uncertainties
will be typical for this type of source when using advanced detectors. Focusing
in particular on heavy BBH of masses similar to GW150914, we find that typical
uncertainties in the estimation of the source-frame component masses will be
around 40\%. We also find that for most events the magnitude of the component
spins will be estimated poorly: for only 10\% of the systems the uncertainties
in the spin magnitude of the primary (secondary) BH will be below 0.7 (0.8).
Conversely, the effective spin along the angular momentum can be estimated more
precisely than either spins, with uncertainties below 0.16 for 10\% of the
systems. We also quantify how often large or negligible primary spins can be
excluded, and how often the sign of the effective spin can be measured. We show
how the angle between the spin and the orbital angular momentum can only seldom
be measured with uncertainties below 60$^\circ$. We then investigate how the
measurement of spin parameters depends on the inclination angle and the total
mass of the source. We find that when precession is present, uncertainties are
smaller for systems observed close to edge-on. Contrarily to what happens for
low-mass, inspiral dominated, sources, for heavy BBH we find that large spins
aligned with the orbital angular momentum can be measured with small
uncertainty. We also show how spin uncertainties increase with the total mass.
Finally...
