How significant is the lensing interpretation of GW231123?

arXiv:2512.19118 · astro-ph.GA, astro-ph.CO, gr-qc · Submitted 2025-12-22 · Read on arXiv

astro-ph.GA, astro-ph.CO, gr-qc

Submitted: 2025-12-22

Updated: 2026-09-23

Comments: 29 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables. comments are welcome

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Microlensing — 10× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 10× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Gravitational Lensing — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Singular Isothermal Sphere — 3× in this paper
• Accuracy — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Degeneracy — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Abundance — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Calibration — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Core — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Weak Lensing — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Directed searches for gravitational waves from ultralight vector boson clouds around merger remnant and galactic black holes during the first part of the fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing run
• Ultralight boson constraints from gravitational wave observations of spinning binary black holes
• Discovering gravitational waveform distortions from lensing: A deep dive into GW231123
• GW231123: Binary Black Hole Merger or Cosmic String?
• GW231123: A Possible Primordial Black Hole Origin
• Lectures on Gravitational Lensing
• Across the Universe: GW231123 as a magnified and diffracted black hole merger
• GW231123: Overlapping Gravitational Wave Signals?
• Assembling GW231123 in star clusters through the combination of stellar binary evolution and hierarchical mergers
• Is GW231123 a hierarchical merger?
• GW231123: extreme spins or microglitches?
• The Hierarchical Merger Scenario for GW231123
• Hierarchical Black Hole Mergers in Nuclear Star Clusters: A Combined Dynamical-Secular Channel for GW231123-like Events
• Shadows of the Colossus: Hierarchical Black Hole Mergers in a 10-million-body Globular Cluster Simulation
• Spin Precession Signatures as an Indicator of Microlensing in Strongly Lensed Gravitational Waves
• GW231123 ringdown: interpretation as multimodal Kerr signal
• From Stars to Waves: Stochastic Inference of Microlensed Gravitational Waves
• On the use and interpretation of signal-model indistinguishability measures for gravitational-wave astronomy
• Attention Is All You Need

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