Effect of Ignoring Eccentricity in Testing General Relativity with Gravitational Waves

Understand

Detections of gravitational waves emitted from binary black hole coalescences allow us to probe the strong-field dynamics of general relativity (GR).

• One can compare the observed gravitational-wave signals with theoretical waveform models to constrain possible deviations from GR.
• Any physics that is not included in these waveform models might show up as apparent GR deviations.
• The waveform models used in current tests of GR describe binaries on quasicircular orbits, since most of the binaries detected by ground-based gravitational-wave detectors are expected to have negligible eccentricities.