Recognition: unknown
Can environmental effects spoil precision gravitational-wave astrophysics?
read the original abstract
[abridged abstract] No, within a broad class of scenarios. With the advent of gravitational-wave (GW) astronomy, environmental effects on the GW signal will eventually have to be quantified. Here we present a wide survey of the corrections due to these effects in two situations of great interest for GW astronomy: the black hole (BH) ringdown emission and the inspiral of two compact objects. We take into account various effects such as: electric charges, magnetic fields, cosmological evolution, possible deviations from General Relativity, firewalls, and various forms of matter such as accretion disks and dark matter halos. Our analysis predicts the existence of resonances dictated by the external mass distribution, which dominate the very late-time behavior of merger/ringdown waveforms. The mode structure can drastically differ from the vacuum case, yet the BH response to external perturbations is unchanged at the time scales relevant for detectors. This is because although the vacuum Schwarzschild resonances are no longer quasinormal modes of the system, they still dominate the response at intermediate times. Our results strongly suggest that both parametrized and ringdown searches should use at least two-mode templates. Our analysis of compact binaries shows that environmental effects are typically negligible for most eLISA sources, with the exception of very few special extreme mass ratio inspirals. We show in particular that accretion and hydrodynamic drag generically dominate over self-force effects for geometrically thin disks, whereas they can be safely neglected for geometrically thick disk environments, which are the most relevant for eLISA. Finally, we discuss how our ignorance of the matter surrounding compact objects implies intrinsic limits on the ability to constrain strong-field deviations from General Relativity.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet.
Forward citations
Cited by 10 Pith papers
-
Resonances as signatures of scalar clouds in eccentric extreme-mass-ratio inspirals
Eccentricity in EMRIs around scalar clouds produces relativistic resonances in scalar fluxes near the last stable orbit, leading to observable dephasing in gravitational waveforms.
-
Novel ringdown tests of general relativity with black hole greybody factors
GreyRing model based on greybody factors reproduces numerical relativity ringdown signals with mismatches of order 10^{-6} and enables a new post-merger consistency test of general relativity applied to GW250114.
-
Testing Dark Energy with Black Hole Ringdown
Dynamical dark energy imprints O(1) shifts on black hole quasi-normal modes via cosmological hair, enabling constraints at 10^{-2} (LVK) to 10^{-4} (LISA) precision using the cubic Galileon as example.
-
Implications of the LISA stochastic signal from eccentric stellar mass black hole binaries in vacuum
High initial eccentricities in stellar-mass black hole binaries produce a stochastic gravitational wave background distinguishable by LISA from quasi-circular models, enabling upper bounds on eccentricity and separati...
-
Relativistic signatures of scalar dark matter in extreme-mass-ratio inspirals
Relativistic metric backreaction from scalar dark matter clouds in EMRIs produces dominant polar gravitational wave corrections for Mμ ≲ 0.12, exceeding axial and scalar radiation channels at small separations.
-
Agnostically decoding gravitational wave model deficiencies in GWTC-3
No evidence for a mass-scale dependent model deficiency is found in the highest-SNR GWTC-3 events.
-
Probing Kerr Symmetry Breaking with LISA Extreme-Mass-Ratio Inspirals
LISA EMRIs can constrain deviations from Kerr equatorial symmetry to 10^{-2} and axial symmetry to 10^{-3} using Analytic Kludge waveforms and Fisher analysis.
-
Axial gravitational perturbations and echo-like signals of a hairy black hole from gravitational decoupling
Axial perturbations around a hairy black hole from gravitational decoupling produce echo-like gravitational-wave signals that arise dynamically from a double-peak trapping cavity in the effective potential.
-
Probing Active Galactic Nuclei and Measuring the Hubble constant with Extreme-Mass-Ratio Inspirals
Modeling accretion disk interactions with EMRIs allows reliable environment identification and boosts dark-siren Hubble constant precision by as much as 20% for individual events.
-
Testing the nature of dark compact objects: a status report
Current and future observations can test whether dark compact objects are Kerr black holes or exotic alternatives, with null results strengthening the black hole paradigm.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.