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farr / AlignedVersusIsoSpin

A calculation and paper comparing aligned and isotropic black hole spin models.
MIT License
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Spin-Kick Discussion Update + References #35

Closed farr closed 7 years ago

farr commented 7 years ago

The spin-kick discussion is inadequate: there are discussion of the issue in Brandt et al. 1995, Sipior et al 2002, Fryer 2003, Willems et al 2005, as well as a number of more recent related papers. In particular, IF there are kicks, they correlate with the probability of the binary remaining bound and its time to coalescence, and hence the post-kick spin alignment is correlated with probability of merger, possibly in a mass-dependent way. Arguably this is beyond the scope of the paper, but it ought to be mentioned.

farr commented 7 years ago

Comment from Cole:

As you requested, I focused on the last three paragraphs in the main text. There is only one sentence that I think could be removed: in the last paragraph, the sentence "Large kicks are..." mentions reduced merger rates for large kicks, but I don't think that is our point and the relevance of large kicks for spin-orbit misalignment hasn't quite been described. Also, deleting that sentence will remove four references from our list.

Others make similar comments, and so perhaps we should just fight the referee on this point.

farr commented 7 years ago

Also from Ilya:

I agree with Cole on this one: I don’t quite see the point of discussing the impact of kicks on rates in the context of isolated binary evolution but not in the context of dynamical formation (which is even more sensitive to kicks — if all black holes were to get kicks of 60 km/s at birth, you would still have some isolated binaries survive to merger, but pretty much all of your black holes would be ejected from typical globular clusters). Maybe we just point this out to the referee? Or, if really necessary, include a more detailed discussion in the supplementary material (but then we should really talk about all the steps in binary evolution and associated uncertainties, not just kicks — otherwise, we look incomplete in a different way)?