Gravitational-wave inference for eccentric binaries: the argument of periapsis

Abstract

Gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers have allowed us to directly observe stellar-mass black hole binaries for the first time, and therefore explore their formation channels. One of the ways to infer how a binary system is assembled is by measuring the system's orbital eccentricity. Current methods of parameter estimation do not include all physical effects of eccentric systems such as spin-induced precession, higher-order modes, and the initial argument of periapsis: an angle describing the orientation of the orbital ellipse. We explore how varying the argument of periapsis changes gravitational waveforms and study its effect on the inference of astrophysical parameters. We use the eccentric spin-aligned waveforms TEOBResumS and SEOBNRE to measure the change in the waveforms as the argument of periapsis is changed. We find that the argument of periapsis could already be impacting analyses performed with TEOBResumS. However, it is likely to be well-resolvable in the foreseeable future only for the loudest events observed by LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA. The systematic error in previous, low-eccentricity analyses that have not considered the argument of periapsis is likely to be small.

7 pages, 4 figures. Accepted in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Four eccentric mergers increase the evidence that LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA's binary black holes form dynamically
• Defining eccentricity for gravitational wave astronomy
• Accurate waveforms for eccentric, aligned-spin binary black holes: The multipolar effective-one-body model SEOBNRv5EHM
• Inferring eccentricity evolution from observations of coalescing binary black holes
• Evidence for eccentricity in the population of binary black holes observed by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA
• Blind spots and biases: the dangers of ignoring eccentricity in gravitational-wave signals from binary black holes
• A study of the Inspiral-Merger-Ringdown Consistency Test with gravitational-wave signals from compact binaries in eccentric orbits
• Eccentric or circular? A reanalysis of binary black hole gravitational wave events for orbital eccentricity signatures
• Time-domain phenomenological multipolar waveforms for aligned-spin binary black holes in elliptical orbits
• Impact of eccentricity and mean anomaly in numerical relativity mergers
• Defining eccentricity for spin-precessing binaries
• Testing eccentric corrections to the radiation-reaction force in the test-mass limit of effective-one-body models
• Data-driven extraction, phenomenology and modeling of eccentric harmonics in binary black hole merger waveforms
• Eccentricity evolution consistency test to distinguish eccentric gravitational-wave signals from eccentricity mimickers
• Comparing eccentric waveform models based on post-Newtonian and effective-one-body approaches, over an observationally relevant parameter space