Speaker
Description
The first detection of gravitational waves in 2015 opened a new window into the universe, offering a unique probe of the properties and evolution of binaries of compact objects (black holes and neutron starts). There are several proposed channels through which these binaries form and merge, and one of the key challenges in gravitational wave astrophysics it to unambiguously pinpoint them through gravitational wave data.
Eccentricity in the orbital motion is smoking gun evidence of a non-isolated formation channel, since stellar-mass eccentric binaries can form in dense stellar environments such as globular clusters or active galactic nuclei, or from triple stellar systems in the Galactic field. However, confidently measuring eccentricity is challenging — short signals from high-mass eccentric mergers can mimic spin-induced precession, making the two effects hard to disentangle. This degeneracy weakens considerably for longer-duration signals. Here, GW200208_222617 provides a rare opportunity. Originating from a relatively low-mass binary, its gravitational-wave signal spanned several inspiral orbital cycles in band, with no indication of data quality issues. Previous analyses strongly favor the eccentric hypothesis, but without ever fully disentangling the spin-precessing - eccentricity ambiguity.
The goal of my work is to re-analyize this event in a way that confidently flags the presence of eccentricity, providing further constraints on its formation channel. In particular, this is done through the use of an inspiral-only waveform model that describes, resorting to post newtonian expansions, spin precession and eccentricity simultaneously.
| Parallel session | Gravitational Waves from Binary Systems |
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