High Eccentricities and High Masses Characterize Gravitational-wave Captures in Galactic Nuclei as Seen by Earth-based Detectors

Understand

The emission of gravitational waves (GWs) during single-single close encounters in galactic nuclei (GNs) leads to the formation and rapid merger of highly eccentric stellar-mass black hole (BH) binaries.

• The distinct distribution of physical parameters makes it possible to statistically distinguish this source population from others.
• Previous studies determined the expected binary parameter distribution for this source population in single GNs.
• Here we take into account the effects of dynamical friction, post-Newtonian corrections, and observational bias to determine the detected sources' parameter-distributions from all GNs in the Universe.