Data Analysis Implications of Moderately Eccentric Gravitational Waves

Understand

While the expectation is that the majority of gravitational wave events observable by ground-based detectors will be emitted by compact binaries in quasi-circular orbits, the growing number of detections suggests the possibility of detecting waves from binaries with non-negligible orbital eccentricity in the near future.

• Several gravitational wave models incorporate the effects of small orbital eccentricities ($e \lesssim 0.2$), but these models may not be sufficient to analyze waves from systems with moderate eccentricity.
• We recently developed a gravitational wave model that faithfully accounts for eccentric corrections in the moderate eccentricity regime ($e \lesssim 0.8$ for certain source masses) at 3rd post-Newtonian order.
• Here we consider the data analysis implications of this particular waveform model by producing and analyzing posteriors via Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods.