Waveform errors may be distorting our map of black hole masses

When gravitational-wave astronomers infer the population of binary black holes, they rely on waveform templates to extract masses from the data. This analysis shows that errors in those templates can shift or blur features in the inferred mass distribution — such as the pile-up near the pair-instability supernova mass gap — by more than the statistical uncertainty even with current detectors. The problem is not merely academic: such distortions could be misread as genuine astrophysical signatures tied to black hole formation channels. The authors quantify how systematic errors scale and outline strategies to account for waveform uncertainty in future population studies.