Detailed properties of gravitational-wave mergers from flyby perturbations of wide binary black holes in the field

Understand

Wide black hole binaries (wide-BBHs; $\geqslant 10^3$ AU) in the field can be perturbed by random stellar flybys that excite their eccentricities.

• Once a wide binary is driven to a sufficiently small pericenter approach, gravitational wave (GW) emission becomes significant, and the binary inspirals and merges.
• In our previous study, using simplified models for wide-BBHs, we found that successive flybys lead to significant merger fractions of wide-BBHs in less than Hubble time, making the flyby perturbation mechanism a relevant contributor to the production rate of GW-sources.
• However, the exact rates and detailed properties of the resulting GW sources depend on the wide binary progenitors.