Population-Level Verification of the Black-Hole Area Law with First- and Second-Generation Black Holes

arXiv:2608.16563 · astro-ph.HE, gr-qc · Submitted 2026-08-17 · Read on arXiv

astro-ph.HE, gr-qc

Submitted: 2026-08-17

Updated: 2026-09-07

Comments: 25 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables, added non-parametric and common-growth analyses

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

Terminology

• Robustness — 3× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Bayesian Inference — 2× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Verification — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Academia Sinica — 1× in this paper
• Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Calibration — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Consistency — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Degeneracy — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
• Golden Binary Gravitational-Wave Sources: Robust Probes of Strong-Field Gravity
• Hunting for Dark Particles with Gravitational Waves
• Observational tests of the black hole area increase law
• Hierarchical triple mergers: testing Hawking's area theorem with the inspiral signals
• Testing the black-hole area law with GW150914
• Model systematics in time domain tests of binary black hole evolution
• Sky marginalization in black hole spectroscopy and tests of the area theorem
• GWTC-5.0: Observations from the Second Part of the Fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Observing Run and Updates to the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog
• GW250114: testing Hawking's area law and the Kerr nature of black holes
• Verification of the Black Hole Area Law with GW230814
• Black Hole Spectroscopy and Tests of General Relativity with GW250114
• Potential Subpopulations and Assembling Tendency of the Merging Black Holes
• Resolving the Stellar-Collapse and Hierarchical-Merger origins of the Coalescing Black Holes
• Aligned Hierarchical Black Hole Mergers in Active-Galactic-Nuclei Disks Revealed by GWTC-4
• A new group of low-spin $50-70M_\odot$ Black Holes and the high pair-instability mass cutoff
• GWTC-5.0: Population Properties of Merging Compact Binaries
• GWTC-3: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the Second Part of the Third Observing Run
• Hierarchical mergers of stellar-mass black holes and their gravitational-wave signatures
• Smoking-gun evidence for hierarchical black-hole mergers

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