English

Archival Inference for Eccentric Stellar-Mass Binary Black Holes in Space-Based Gravitational Wave Observations

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2026-05-01 v2

Abstract

Space-based gravitational-wave observatories will detect the early inspiral of stellar-mass binary black holes and can track their eccentricity evolution. However, untargeted searches in the space band are computationally demanding and require relatively high detection thresholds (signal-to-noise ratio 15\sim 15). Information from ground-based detections can significantly shrink the parameter space for space-band analyses and thereby substantially reduce the detection threshold. We present a Bayesian inference pipeline for ground-triggered archival space-band analyses that includes eccentricity. Using ground-informed priors, we demonstrate that with one year of LISA or TianQin data a GW190521-like source with signal-to-noise ratio 7\sim 7 can be distinguished and tightly constrained. In this setup, space observations sharpened the redshifted chirp mass from O(103)M\mathcal{O}(10^{-3})M_\odot to O(105)M\mathcal{O}(10^{-5})M_\odot, and constrain the eccentricity to O(105)\mathcal{O}(10^{-5}) around the injected value e0.01Hz=0.1e_{0.01\mathrm{Hz}}=0.1. These results demonstrate that inference of eccentric stellar-mass binary black holes in noisy space-band data is practically feasible, supports an expanded yield of multiband detections, and strengthens prospects for future astrophysical and gravitational tests.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.07174,
  title  = {Archival Inference for Eccentric Stellar-Mass Binary Black Holes in Space-Based Gravitational Wave Observations},
  author = {Han Wang and Michael J. Williams and Ian Harry and Yi-Ming Hu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.07174},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

12 pages, 4 figures, comments welcome

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:24:17.882Z