… and we’re back to selection effects. That means modeling what you cannot see. The black holes that gravitational-wave detectors observe are not representative of those that are out there in the Universe. Some are easier to see, some are harder. Quantifying how much easier and harder is crucial to properly understand the underlying astrophysics. In this paper (which came out of a BSc student project!), we go back to the basics and work out gravitational-wave selection effects one step after the other, using and refining the most common approximation. Two things to remember: including noise fluctuations is easy, and a signal-to-noise ratio threshold of 11 is probably ok.

Davide Gerosa, Malvina Bellotti.
Classical and Quantum Gravity, in press.
arXiv:2404.16930 [astro-ph.HE].