Resolving the formation channel(s) of merging binary black holes is a key goal in gravitational-wave astronomy. The orbital eccentricity is believed to be a precious tracer of the underlying formation pathway, but is largely dissipated during the usually long inspiral between black hole formation and merger. Most gravitational-wave sources are thus expected to enter the sensitivity windows of current detectors on configurations that are compatible with quasi-circular orbits. In this paper, we investigate the impact of "negligible" residual eccentricity -- lower than currently detectable by LIGO/Virgo -- on our ability to infer the formation history of binary black holes, focusing in particular on their spin orientations. We trace the evolution of both observed and synthetic gravitational-wave events backward in time, while resampling their residual eccentricities to values that are below the detectability threshold. Eccentricities in-band as low as ∼10−4 can lead to significant biases when reconstructing the spin directions, especially in the case of loud, highly precessing systems. Residual eccentricity thus act like a systematic uncertainty for our astrophysical inference. As a mitigation strategy, one can marginalize the posterior distribution over the residual eccentricity using astrophysical predictions.
@article{arxiv.2405.14945,
title = {Residual eccentricity as a systematic uncertainty on the formation channels of binary black holes},
author = {Giulia Fumagalli and Isobel Romero-Shaw and Davide Gerosa and Viola De Renzis and Konstantinos Kritos and Aleksandra Olejak},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.14945},
year = {2024}
}