Detection of gravitational waves (GW) from highly eccentric binary black hole (BBH) systems can provide insight into their dynamics and formation. To date, no BBH systems have been detected with eccentricity $e > 0.1$, making it difficult to constrain their formation pathways. Current search methods used by ground based GW detectors are not equipped to detect highly eccentric sources. Template based, matched-filter searches lack reliable highly eccentric waveform models. Unmodeled burst searches are designed to detected localized excess power and are unable to identify multiple isolated bursts as originating from a single highly eccentric BBH. Therefore, we propose a signal based prior that can be incorporated into an existing GW burst search to target highly eccentric BBHs. Our eccentric burst prior is based on the Newtonian burst model described by Loutrel & Yunes (2017). As a proof of concept, we tested our method on simulated data and found that for intermediate SNR $sim3-6$ using the eccentric burst prior more effectively localized GW bursts compared to a uniform prior.
Download