Active Galactic Nuclei as Factories for Eccentric Black Hole Mergers

Black hole mergers detected by LIGO and Virgo continue delivering transformational discoveries. The most recent example is the merger GW190521, which is the first detected with component masses exceeding the limit predicted by stellar models, and the first with non-zero orbital eccentricity. The large masses can be explained by build up through successive mergers, which has been suggested to occur efficiently in the gas disks of active galactic nuclei (AGN). The eccentricity, however, is a major puzzle. Here we show that AGN-disk environments naturally lead to a very high fraction of highly eccentric mergers, if interactions between binaries and singles are frequent, and the interactions are constrained to a plane representing the AGN-disk. By deriving a statistical solution to the chaotic 3-body problem with the inclusion of General Relativistic corrections, we find in our fiducial AGN-disk model that up to 70 percent of all black hole mergers could appear with an eccentricity >0.1 in LIGO/Virgo. Besides representing the most effective mechanism for producing eccentric mergers presented to date, our results have also profound implications for the origin of GW190521, and open up new lines of research on black hole scatterings in disk environments with far-reaching implications for gravitational wave astrophysics.