Characterizing Astrophysical Binary Neutron Stars with Gravitational Waves

Merging binary neutron stars are thought to be formed predominantly via isolated binary evolution. In this standard formation scenario, the first-born neutron star goes through a recycling process and might be rapidly spinning during the final inspiral, whereas the second-born star is expected to have effectively zero spin at merger. Based on this feature, we propose a new framework for the astrophysical characterization of binary neutron stars observed from their gravitational wave emission. We further propose a prior for the dimensionless spins of recycled neutron stars, given by a gamma distribution with a shape parameter of 2 and a scale parameter of 0.012, extrapolated from radio pulsar observations of Galactic binary neutron stars. Interpreting GW170817 and GW190425 in the context of the standard formation scenario and adopting the gamma-distribution prior, we find positive support (with a Bayes factor of 6, over the nonspinning hypothesis) for a spinning recycled neutron star in GW190425, whereas the spin of the recycled neutron star in GW170817 is small and consistent with our prior. We measure the masses of the recycled (slow) neutron stars in GW170817 and GW190425 to be ${1.34}_{-0.09}^{+0.12}$ $({1.38}_{-0.11}^{+0.11}){M}_{\odot }$ and ${1.64}_{-0.11}^{+0.13}$ $({1.66}_{-0.12}^{+0.12}){M}_{\odot }$, with 68% credibility, respectively. We discuss implications for the astrophysical origins of these two events and outline future prospects of studying binary neutron stars using our framework.