Eccentric or circular? A reanalysis of binary black hole gravitational wave events for orbital eccentricity signatures

Abstract

We present a reanalysis of 17 gravitational-wave events detected with Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo in their first three observing runs, using the new IMRPhenomTEHM model -- a phenomenological time-domain multipolar waveform model for aligned-spin black-hole binaries in elliptical orbits with two eccentric parameters: eccentricity and mean anomaly. We also analyze all events with the underlying quasi-circular model IMRPhenomTHM to study the impact of including eccentricity and compare the eccentric and quasi-circular binary hypotheses. The high computational efficiency of IMRPhenomTEHM enables us to explore the impact of two different eccentricity priors -- uniform and log-uniform -- as well as different sampler and data settings. We find evidence for eccentricity in two publicly available LVK events, GW200129 and GW200208_22, with Bayes factors favoring the eccentric hypothesis over the quasi-circular aligned-spin scenario: ${\log }_{10}{\mathcal{B}}_{E/QC}\in \left[1.30_{-0.15}^{+0.15},5.14_{-0.15}^{+0.15}\right]$ and ${\log }_{10}{\mathcal{B}}_{E/QC}\in \left[0.49_{-0.08}^{+0.08},1.14_{-0.08}^{+0.08}\right]$, respectively. Additionally, the two high-mass events GW190701 and GW190929 exhibit potential eccentric features. For all four events, we conduct further analyses to study the impact of different sampler settings. We also investigate waveform systematics by exploring the support for spin precession using IMRPhenomTPHM and NRSur7dq4, offering new insights into the formation channels of detected binaries. Our results highlight the importance of considering eccentric waveform models in future observing runs, alongside precessing models, as they can help mitigate potential biases in parameter estimation studies. This will be particularly relevant with the expected increase in the diversity of the binary black hole population with new detectors.

19 pages, 5 figures, 1 table

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Time-domain phenomenological multipolar waveforms for aligned-spin binary black holes in elliptical orbits
• Adding equatorial-asymmetric effects for spin-precessing binaries into the SEOBNRv5PHM waveform model
• First eccentric inspiral-merger-ringdown analysis of neutron star-black hole mergers
• Gravitational-wave Observations Suggest Most Black Hole Mergers Form in Triples
• Biased parameter inference of eccentric, spin-precessing binary black holes
• Neural Post-Einsteinian Test of General Relativity with the Third Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog
• Chase Orbits, not Time: A Scalable Paradigm for Long-Duration Eccentric Gravitational-Wave Surrogates
• Early Warning From Eccentric Compact Binaries: Template Initialization And Sub-dominant Mode Effects
• Systematic bias due to eccentricity in parameter estimation for merging binary neutron stars : Spinning case
• Inferring host environment properties and gravitational-wave decay time from the eccentricity measurement of dynamically captured binaries
• Probing missing physics from inspiralling compact binaries via time-frequency tracks
• Assessment of normalizing flows for parameter estimation on time-frequency representations of gravitational-wave data