How to confirm the existence of population III stars by observations of gravitational waves

Akinobu Miyamoto, Tomoya Kinugawa, Takashi Nakamura, Nobuyuki Kanda

Published 2017-09-25Version 1

We propose a method for confirmation of the existence of Population III (Pop III) stars with massive black hole binaries as GW150914 in gravitational wave (GW) observation. When we get enough number of events, we want to determine which model is closer to reality, with and without Pop III stars. We need to prepare various "Pop I/II models" and various "Pop I/II/III models" and investigate which model is consistent with the events. To demonstrate our analysis, we simulate detections of GW events for some examples of population synthesis models with and without Pop III stars. We calculate the likelihood ratio with the realistic number of events and evaluate the probability of identifying the existence of Pop III stars. In typical cases, our analysis can distinguish between Pop I/II model and Pop I/II/III model with 90% probability by 22 GW signals from black hole-black hole binary mergers.