Exciting Stellar Eccentricity in Gaia BH3 via a Hidden Black Hole Binary

We propose that the high eccentricity of the stellar orbit in the Gaia BH3 system could be excited through a secular resonance effect if the inner dark object is, in effect, a tight and eccentric black hole binary (BHB). During the orbital decay of the inner BHB, the apsidal precession rate of the inner binary matches that of the outer stellar orbit, and this resonance advection can drive the outer eccentricity into some extreme values. For a Gaia BH3-like system, we show that a near equal-mass (\(q = 0.8\)) BHB with an initial semimajor axis of \(1─3\) au and an initial eccentricity \(\gtrsim 0.95\) is able to excite the outer orbit to the observed value, leaving a current BHB with a semimajor axis \(0.25─0.5\) au and eccentricity \(\sim0.8\). The eccentric inner BHB imprints two observable signatures on the outer star: (1) short-term radial velocity (RV) modulations with an amplitude \(\lesssim 100\) m s−1 and (2) long-term apsidal precession with a rate \(\lesssim 0.^{\circ}1\) yr−1.