Masses of merging compact object binaries Original Research Article

We analyze the distribution of masses of compact object binaries observed in gravitational waves. We simulate the population of such binaries using the Star Track population synthesis code. We find that black hole – black hole binaries observed in gravitational waves will be dominated by the nearly equal mass objects, the black hole – neutron star binaries will mostly be the ones with the mass ratio q < 0.5. The neutron star – neutron star binaries observed in gravitational waves are very likely to include large number of non equal mass systems with small mass ratio, as low as even q ≈ 0.6 − 0.7.