Black-hole spectroscopy: testing general relativity through gravitational-wave observations

By O. Dreyer, B. Kelly, B. Krishnan, L. Finn, D. Garrison, Ramón López-Alemán. 2003

392 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Assuming that general relativity is the correct theory of gravity in the strong-field limit, can gravitational-wave observations distinguish between black holes and other compact object sources? Alternatively, can gravitational-wave observations provide a test of one of the fundamental predictions of general relativity: the no-hair theorem? Here we describe a definitive test of the hypothesis that observations of damped, sinusoidal gravitational waves originate from a black hole or, alternatively, that nature respects the general relativistic no-hair theorem. For astrophysical black holes, which have a negligible charge-to-mass ratio, the black-hole quasi-normal mode spectrum is characterized entirely by the black-hole mass and angular momentum and is unique to black holes. In a different theory of gravity, or if the observed radiation arises from a different source (e.g., a neutron star, strange matter or boson star), the spectrum will be inconsistent with that predicted for general relativistic black holes. We give a statistical characterization of the consistency between the noisy observation and the theoretical predictions of general relativity and a demonstration, through simulation, of the effectiveness of the test for strong sources.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/57e74bfd08f10b51fe799466e344af7a8ab9b8ac

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Holz
2. Michela Mapelli
3. Maya Fishbach
4. Emanuele Berti
5. Ilya Mandel
6. C. Berry
7. N. Giacobbo
8. Luca Baiotti

Citations in the corpus

• Pseudospectrum and Black Hole Quasinormal Mode Instability (2020, neutral): “064030 [16] Dreyer, O.”
• Black Hole Ringdown: The Importance of Overtones (2019, background): “Studies of the ringdown GW spectrum can provide a direct way to experimentally determine whether compact binary coalescences result in the Kerr BHs predicted by GR [23,24].”
• GW231123: A Binary Black Hole Merger with Total Mass 190–265 M⊙ (2025, positive): “Massive systems dominated by merger-ringdown, such as GW231123, are ideal to test the BH signal interpretation by applying BH spectroscopy techniques (Dreyer et al. 2004; Berti et al. 2009, 2025), yielding remnant properties under minimal assumptions on the remnant formation process.”
• Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, background): “The reason is that a two-mode signal contains four parameters (the frequencies and damping times of each mode), which must all be consistent with the same mass and spin values (Dreyer et al., 2004).”