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Four eccentric mergers increase the evidence that LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA's binary black holes form dynamically

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arxiv 2206.14695 v2 pith:GXUJUTM7 submitted 2022-06-29 astro-ph.HE

Isobel M. Romero-Shaw , Paul D. Lasky , Eric Thrane This is my paper · ORCID
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abstract

The growing population of compact binary mergers detected with gravitational waves contains multiple events that are challenging to explain through isolated binary evolution. Such events have higher masses than are expected in isolated binaries, component spin-tilt angles that are misaligned, and/or non-negligible orbital eccentricities. We investigate the orbital eccentricities of 62 binary black hole candidates from the third gravitational-wave transient catalogue of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration with an aligned-spin, moderate-eccentricity waveform model. Within this framework, we find that at least four of these events show significant support for eccentricity $e_{10} \geq 0.1$ at a gravitational-wave frequency of $10$~Hz ($> 60\%$ credibility, under a log-uniform eccentricity prior that spans the range $10^{-4} < e_{10} < 0.2$). Two of these events are new additions to the population: GW191109 and GW200208\_22. If the four eccentric candidates are truly eccentric, our results suggest that densely-populated star clusters may produce 100\% of the observed mergers. However, it remains likely that other formation environments with higher yields of eccentric mergers -- for example, active galactic nuclei -- also contribute. We estimate that we will be able to confidently distinguish which formation channel dominates the eccentric merger rate after $\gtrsim 80$ detections of events with $e_{10} \geq 0.05$ at LIGO--Virgo sensitivity, with only $\sim 5$ detectably-eccentric events required to distinguish formation channels with third-generation gravitational-wave detectors.

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Cited by 8 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Impact of eccentricity and higher-modes on neutron star-black hole parameter estimation

    astro-ph.HE 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Eccentric NSBH signals like GW200105 contain much more information about masses, mass ratio, and effective spin per unit SNR than circular signals, but not about sky position or distance.

  2. Assessing the waveform systematics from parameter estimation to population inference with eccentricity

    astro-ph.HE 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Eccentric waveform-model differences, small per event, accumulate across the GWTC-4 catalog and alter inferred redshift evolution and effective-spin population distributions.

  3. Gravitational-wave astronomy requires population-informed parameter estimation

    gr-qc 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Single-event GW parameter estimates under reference priors are population-biased; hierarchical, population-informed re-analysis is needed and changes the identification of the most extreme black holes in the catalog.

  4. Can Eccentric Binary Black Hole Signals Mimic Gravitational-Wave Microlensing?

    gr-qc 2025-12 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Eccentric BBH signals can masquerade as wave-optics microlensing in quasicircular analyses, but eccentric recovery templates break the degeneracy.

  5. Accelerated Sequential Posterior Inference via Reuse for Gravitational-Wave Analyses

    hep-ex 2025-11 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    ASPIRE reuses old posterior samples via normalizing flows and sequential Monte Carlo to produce unbiased posteriors and evidences under new models, cutting likelihood evaluations 4-10x.

  6. Chase Orbits, not Time: A Scalable Paradigm for Long-Duration Eccentric Gravitational-Wave Surrogates

    gr-qc 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Eccentric inspiral waveforms are modeled against mean anomaly rather than time, yielding an order-of-magnitude compression and a 2.77e6 M surrogate that is ~20x faster to evaluate.

  7. Inferring the pair-instability mass gap from gravitational wave data

    astro-ph.HE 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Non-parametric analysis of GWTC-3 finds a transition at roughly 46 solar masses above which the effective spin distribution broadens and becomes consistent with symmetry around zero, consistent with second-generation ...

  8. PhenomXPNR: An improved gravitational wave model linking precessing inspirals and NR-calibrated merger-ringdown

    gr-qc 2025-07 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    PhenomXPNR is a fast frequency-domain gravitational-wave template for spinning black-hole mergers that combines post-Newtonian inspiral precession with numerical-relativity-calibrated merger and ringdown.

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