Residual eccentricity as a systematic uncertainty on the formation channels of binary black holes

Resolving the formation channel(s) of merging binary black holes is a key goal in gravitational-wave astronomy.

The orbital eccentricity is believed to be a precious tracer of the underlying formation pathway, but is largely dissipated during the usually long inspiral between black hole formation and merger.

Most gravitational-wave sources are thus expected to enter the sensitivity windows of current detectors on configurations that are compatible with quasi-circular orbits.

In this paper, we investigate the impact of "negligible" residual eccentricity -- lower than currently detectable by LIGO/Virgo -- on our ability to infer the formation history of binary black holes, focusing in particular on their spin orientations.

We trace the evolution of both observed and synthetic gravitational-wave events backward in time, while resampling their residual eccentricities to values that are below the detectability threshold.

Eccentricities in-band as low as $\sim 10^{-4}$ can lead to significant biases when reconstructing the spin directions, especially in the case of loud, highly precessing systems.

Residual eccentricity thus act like a systematic uncertainty for our astrophysical inference.

As a mitigation strategy, one can marginalize the posterior distribution over the residual eccentricity using astrophysical predictions.

;Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables