A universal natal spin in stellar-mass black holes

Shu-Xu Yi, Tian-Yong Cao, Shuang-Nan Zhang

公開日: 2025/4/8

Abstract

A stellar mass black hole (BH) is believed to be formed as the result of the core collapse of a massive star at the end of its evolution. For a class of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), it is widely believed that their centre engines are just these stellar-mass BHs, which accrete the collapsing matter in hyper-accretion mode. In such systems, a popular scenario is that the magnetic field supported in the accretion disk extracts the rotational energy of the spinning BH and launches a jet on one hand, and the accretion of the infalling matter of the collapse will increase the BH's rotational energy on the other hand. Here we report that when the accretion process is dominated by a Magnetically-Arrested-Disk (MAD), the above-mentioned two competing processes link to each other, so that the spin evolution of the BH can be written in a simple form. Most interestingly, when the total accreted mass is enough, the BH spin will always reach an equilibrium value. This value does not depend on the initial mass and spin of the BH, as well as the history of accretion but is a function of the accretion physics near the event horizon. This model predicts that there is a population of stellar-mass BH that possess a universal spin at the end of the collapsing accretion. We test this prediction against the 4th gravitational wave (GW) catalogue (GWTC-4.0) and found that there is a dominating population with high significance, in which the distribution of the spin of the secondary BH is centred narrowly around a single value ~0.017. The above-mentioned scenario is supported and the parameters of the accretion physics near the event horizon can be thus constrained. The result is also consistent with previous numerical simulations.

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