Unveiling the Merger Structure of Black Hole Binaries in Generic Planar Orbits.

The precise modeling of binary black hole coalescences in generic planar orbits is a crucial step to disentangle dynamical and isolated binary formation channels through gravitational-wave observations. The merger regime of such coalescences exhibits a significantly higher complexity compared to the quasicircular case, and cannot be readily described through standard parametrizations in terms of eccentricity and anomaly. In the spirit of the effective one body formalism, we build on the study of the test-mass limit, and introduce a new modeling strategy to describe the general-relativistic dynamics of two-body systems in generic orbits.