Gravitational waves from spinning eccentric binaries

TL;DR

This paper introduces CBwaves, a fast computational tool for modeling gravitational waves from generic spinning eccentric binaries, revealing limitations of circular templates and characteristics of eccentric waveforms.

Contribution

The paper presents CBwaves, a novel software that accurately models gravitational waveforms from spinning eccentric binaries within the post-Newtonian framework.

Findings

Circular templates are ineffective for eccentric binaries.

Energy balance relation is insensitive to radiation reaction form.

Eccentric binaries emit distinctive early-phase gravitational waves.

Abstract

This paper is to introduce a new software called CBwaves which provides a fast and accurate computational tool to determine the gravitational waveforms yielded by generic spinning binaries of neutron stars and/or black holes on eccentric orbits. This is done within the post-Newtonian (PN) framework by integrating the equations of motion and the spin precession equations while the radiation field is determined by a simultaneous evaluation of the analytic waveforms. In applying CBwaves various physically interesting scenarios have been investigated. In particular, we have studied the appropriateness of the adiabatic approximation, and justified that the energy balance relation is indeed insensitive to the specific form of the applied radiation reaction term. By studying eccentric binary systems it is demonstrated that circular template banks are very ineffective in identifying binaries even if they possess tiny residual orbital eccentricity. In addition, by investigating the validity of the energy balance relation we show that, on contrary to the general expectations, the post-Newtonian approximation should not be applied once the post-Newtonian parameter gets beyond the critical value $\sim 0.08-0.1$. Finally, by studying the early phase of the gravitational waves emitted by strongly eccentric binary systems---which could be formed e.g. in various many-body interactions in the galactic halo---we have found that they possess very specific characteristics which may be used to identify these type of binary systems.