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We present a detailed investigation into the properties of GW170729, thegravitational wave with the most massive and distant source confirmed to date.We employ an extensive set of waveform models, including new improved modelsthat incorporate the effect of higher-order waveform modes which areparticularly important for massive systems. We find no indication ofspin-precession, but the inclusion of higher-order modes in the models resultsin an improved estimate for the mass ratio of $(0.3-0.8)$ at the 90\% crediblelevel. Our updated measurement excludes equal masses at that level. We alsofind that models with higher-order modes lead to the data being more consistentwith a smaller effective spin, with the probability that the effective spin isgreater than zero being reduced from $99\%$ to $94\%$. The 90\% credibleinterval for the effective spin parameter is now $(-0.01-0.50)$. Additionally,the recovered signal-to-noise ratio increases by $\sim0.3$ units compared toanalyses without higher-order modes. We study the effect of common spin priorson the derived spin and mass measurements, and observe small shifts in thespins, while the masses remain unaffected. We argue that our conclusions arerobust against systematic errors in the waveform models. We also compare theabove waveform-based analysis which employs compact-binary waveform models to amore flexible wavelet- and chirplet-based analysis. We find consistency betweenthe two, with overlaps of $\sim 0.9$, typical of what is expected fromsimulations of signals similar to GW170729, confirming that the data arewell-described by the existing waveform models. Finally, we study thepossibility that the primary component of GW170729 was the remnant of a pastmerger of two black holes and find this scenario to be indistinguishable fromthe standard formation scenario.

On the properties of the massive binary black hole merger GW170729