Phenomenology and origin of late-time tails in eccentric binary black hole mergers

Understand

We investigate the late-time tail behavior in gravitational waves from merging eccentric binary black holes (BBH) using black hole perturbation theory.

• For simplicity, we focus only on the dominant quadrupolar mode of the radiation.
• We demonstrate that such tails become more prominent as eccentricity increases.
• Exploring the phenomenology of the tails in both spinning and non-spinning eccentric binaries, with the spin magnitude varying from $\chi=-0.6$ to $\chi=+0.6$ and eccentricity as high as $e=0.98$, we find that these tails can be well approximated by a slowly decaying power law.