Abstract
We constrain the distribution of merging compact binaries across the celestial sphere using the GWTC-3 catalog from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaborations’ (LVK) third observing run. With 63 confident detections from O3, we constrain the relative variability (standard deviation) of the rate density across the sky to be at 90% confidence assuming the logarithm of the rate density is described by a Gaussian random field with correlation length . This tightens to when the correlation length is . While the new data provides the tightest constraints on anisotropies available to date, we do not find overwhelming evidence in favor of isotropy, either. A simple counting experiment favors an isotropic distribution by a factor of , which is nonetheless an improvement of more than a factor of two compared to analogous analyses based on only the LVK’s first and second observing runs.
2 More- Received 14 July 2022
- Accepted 8 December 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.107.043016
© 2023 American Physical Society