Can environmental effects spoil precision gravitational-wave astrophysics?

By E. Barausse, V. Cardoso, Paolo Pani. 2014

405 citations recorded by the source corpus.

[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.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/94c360d6fccd160e53299c1856fa355e37e725d7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Superradiance (2015, background): “[314, 315, 316] for reviews).”
Primordial black holes confront LIGO/Virgo data: current situation (2020, background): “Accretion introduces a further secular change to the orbital parameters, in addition to GW radiation-reaction [61, 64, 65].”
Tests for the existence of black holes through gravitational wave echoes (2017, background): “The historical detection of GWs by aLIGO [37] opens up the exciting possibility of testing gravity in extreme regimes with unprecedented accuracy [38–43].”
Superradiance: Energy Extraction, Black-Hole Bombs and Implications for Astrophysics and Particle Physics (2015, background): “Because of quantum and classical discharge effects, astrophysical BHs are thought to be neutral to a very good approximation [500, 461, 462, 63, 248].”
Pseudospectrum and Black Hole Quasinormal Mode Instability (2020, background): “In astrophysics, the understanding of possible environmental observational signatures in (“dirty”) BHs prompted a research line [10, 11] significantly intensified in recent times [12–14].”
Constraining the mass of dark photons and axion-like particles through black-hole superradiance (2018, background): “Astrophysical BHs are electrically neutral due to quantum discharge effects, electron-positron pair production, and charge neutralization by astrophysical plasma, and the magnetic fields of accretion disks is too weak to affect the dynamics of the system [51, 52].”
Testing black hole candidates with electromagnetic radiation (2015, background): “The presence of an accretion disk is normally negligible, because the disk is extended and has a low density (Barausse et al., 2014).”