Estimating the Chirp Mass of Eccentric Inspiraling Binary Systems from Time-Frequency Representations of their Gravitational Radiation

Using the simplest yet meaningful Peters-Mathews model describing the orbital damping of a compact binary system under the emission of gravitatonal radiation, we show that the chirp-mass of an eccentric inspiraling binary, and its (Keplerian) orbital eccentricity at some reference time, can be estimated from the time-frequency skeleton of its gravitational wave signal. The estimation algorithm is nicely simple, and is robust against the non-ideal (non Gaussian, non stationary) features of detector noise.