Dr. Juan Calderon Bustillo, Galician Institute for High Energy Physics at the University of Santiago de Compostela

"Analysing LIGO-Virgo heavy compact mergers in the context of boson-star mergers"

Abstract: Gravitational-wave signals from high-mass compact binary coalescences mostly display the merger and ringdown portions of the process, barely providing any information about the properties of the initial objects. Consequently, the interpretation of the source is less robust than that of lighter mergers displaying long inspiral signals. In this talk I will discuss the role of prior choices in Bayesian inference of the properties of high-mass mergers, using the controversial GW190521 as a driving example. In particular, I will show that this confirmed signal and other low-significance triggers are consistent with numerical simulations of mergers of exotic compact objects known as boson stars and allow for a measurement of its putative building block: an ultra-light boson of spin 1.