Sky marginalization in black hole spectroscopy and tests of the area theorem

Direct observation of gravitational waves from binary black hole (BBH) mergers has made it possible to test the laws of black-hole thermodynamics using real astrophysical sources. These tests rely on accurate and unbiased parameter estimates from the pre- and post-merger portions of a signal. Due to numerical complications, previous analyses have fixed the sky location and coalescence time when estimating the parameters of the pre- and post-merger signal. Here we overcome the numerical complications and present a novel method of marginalizing over sky location and coalescence time. Doing so, we find that it is not possible to model only the pre- or post-merger portions of signal while marginalizing over timing uncertainty. We surmount this problem by simultaneously yet independently modelling the pre- and post-merger signal, with only the sky location and coalescence time being shared between the models. This allows us to marginalize over all parameters. We use our method to measure the change in area Δ A_ measured = A_f - A_i between the final and initial black holes in the BBH merger GW150914. To measure the final black hole's area A_f we do an analysis using quasi-normal modes (QNMs) to model the post-merger signal, and another analysis using the post-merger portion of an inspiral-merger-ringdown (IMR) template. We find excellent agreement with expectations from General Relativity. The Hawking area theorem (which states that A_f ≥ A_i) is confirmed to 95.5% and 99.5% confidence using the QNM and IMR post-merger models, respectively. Both models yield Δ A_ measured / Δ A_ expecxted∼ 1, where Δ A_ expected is the expected change in area derived from fits to numerical relativity simulations.