On the exceptionality of exceptional gravitational-wave events

We detect many gravitational-wave events, but we like some of them more than others (and write lots of papers about those!). These exceptional events are considered exceptional because they differ from the rest—and often make headlines (the most massive black hole! the fastest-spinning black hole!). But are these events truly special? They could be, or perhaps they are simply affected by large measurement errors that make them appear special. In this paper, we investigate the “exceptionality of exceptional gravitational-wave events” from a statistical perspective and find that our current (often implicit) procedures for selecting exceptional events are, in fact, very fragile.

R. Tenorio, D. Gerosa.
arXiv:2601.02467 [astro-ph.HE].