How lonely are the Binary Compact Objects Detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration?

Abstract

Gravitational-wave (GW) observations of compact binary coalescences (CBCs) are traditionally interpreted under the assumption that the binary evolves in isolation. However, in realistic astrophysical environments, brief three-body encounters may perturb the binary's orbital evolution and imprint deviations on the emitted GWs. We develop a physically motivated model for such interactions, retaining Newtonian three-body dynamics supplemented by leading-order ($2.5$PN) radiation-reaction within the binary. We show that such encounters produce a distinctive morphology of dephasing and amplitude modulation in GWs. We search for this kind of distortion from the LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA (LVK) GW catalog GWTC-4 on three events: GW170817, GW190814, and GW230627\_015337, chosen based on high SNR and in-band duration $\gtrsim 10\mathrm{s}$. We find no statistically significant deviation in the data, which translates into constraints on the absence of any intermediate-mass black hole in the mass range above $\sim 10^2$ M${}_{\odot }$ in the vicinity of these binaries of radius approximately $10^{-1}\mathrm{AU}$. This arises from robust exclusions arising from fly-by interactions that would dynamically disrupt the binary and are directly ruled out independent of waveform modelling, placing the first upper bound on intermediate-mass black holes near these GW events. In future, with the availability of long-duration GW signals, this new avenue can probe encounters of the binary GW sources with compact objects of lighter masses at distances farther away than 1 AU and hence opens a new window to probe the population of individual compact objects of both astrophysical and primordial origin in astrophysical systems of dense environments ranging from galactic centers to dense globular clusters.

24 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables