Red vs. Blue: How metallicity shapes black hole dynamics and mergers in dense star clusters

arXiv:2606.23788 · astro-ph.GA, astro-ph.CO, astro-ph.HE, gr-qc · Submitted 2026-06-22 · Read on arXiv

Saloni Agrawal, Kyle Kremer, Michael Zevin, Cailin Plunkett, Elena González Prieto, Fulya Kıroğlu, Christopher E. O'Connor, Frederic A. Rasio, Claire S. Ye

astro-ph.GA, astro-ph.CO, astro-ph.HE, gr-qc

Submitted: 2026-06-22

Comments: 14 pages, 7 figures, 1 table. Submitted to ApJ, comments are welcome

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Metallicity — 108× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Core — 27× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Mass Segregation — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Consistency — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Distribution Shift — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Recent LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA — 1× in this paper

Sources

• Black hole mergers from dense star clusters with realistic binary populations
• An analytical approach to binary populations in globular clusters
• GWTC-4.0: Updating the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog with Observations from the First Part of the Fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Observing Run

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