No Arabic abstract
Teukolsky equations for $|s|=2$ provide efficient ways to solve for curvature perturbations around Kerr black holes. Imposing regularity conditions on these perturbations on the future (past) horizon corresponds to imposing an in-going (out-going) wave boundary condition. For exotic compact objects (ECOs) with external Kerr spacetime, however, it is not yet clear how to physically impose boundary conditions for curvature perturbations on their boundaries. We address this problem using the Membrane Paradigm, by considering a family of fiducial observers (FIDOs) that float right above the horizon of a linearly perturbed Kerr black hole. From the reference frame of these observers, the ECO will experience tidal perturbations due to in-going gravitational waves, respond to these waves, and generate out-going waves. As it also turns out, if both in-going and out-going waves exist near the horizon, the Newman Penrose (NP) quantity $psi_0$ will be numerically dominated by the in-going wave, while the NP quantity $psi_4$ will be dominated by the out-going wave. In this way, we obtain the ECO boundary condition in the form of a relation between $psi_0$ and the complex conjugate of $psi_4$, in a way that is determined by the ECOs tidal response in the FIDO frame. We explore several ways to modify gravitational-wave dispersion in the FIDO frame, and deduce the corresponding ECO boundary condition for Teukolsky functions. We subsequently obtain the boundary condition for $psi_4$ alone, as well as for the Sasaki-Nakamura and Detweilers functions. As it also turns out, reflection of spinning ECOs will generically mix between different $ell$ components of the perturbations fields, and be different for perturbations with different parities. We also apply our boundary condition to computing gravitational-wave echoes from spinning ECOs, and solve for the spinning ECOs quasi-normal modes.
During the early phase of in-spiral of a binary system, the tidal heating of a compact object due to its companion plays a significant role in the determination of the orbital evolution of the binary. The phenomenon depends crucially on the `hairs, as well as on the nature of the compact object. It turns out that the presence of extra dimension affects both these properties, by incorporating an extra tidal charge for braneworld black holes and also by introducing quantum effects, leading to the possible existence of exotic compact objects. It turns out that the phasing information from tidal heating in the gravitational wave waveform can constrain the tidal charge inherited from extra dimension to a value $sim 10^{-6}$, the most stringent constraint, to date. Moreover, second-order effects in tidal heating for exotic compact objects, also reveal an oscillatory behavior with respect to spin, which has unique signatures.
Exotic compact objects (ECOs) have recently become an exciting research subject, since they are speculated to have a special response to the incident gravitational waves (GWs) that leads to GW echoes. We show that energy carried by GWs can easily cause the event horizon to form out of a static ECO --- leaving no echo signals towards spatial infinity. To show this, we use the ingoing Vaidya spacetime and take into account the back reaction due to incoming GWs. Demanding that an ECO does not collapse into a black hole puts an upper bound on the compactness of the ECO, at the cost of less distinct echo signals for smaller compactness. The trade-off between echoes detectability and distinguishability leads to a fine tuning of ECO parameters for LIGO to find distinct echoes. We also show that an extremely compact ECO that can survive the gravitational collapse and give rise to GW echoes might have to expand its surface in a non-causal way.
Gravitational-wave astronomy can give us access to the structure of black holes, potentially probing microscopic or even Planckian corrections at the horizon scale, as those predicted by some quantum-gravity models of exotic compact objects. A generic feature of these models is the replacement of the horizon by a reflective surface. Objects with these properties are prone to the so-called ergoregion instability when they spin sufficiently fast. We investigate in detail a simple model consisting of scalar perturbations of a Kerr geometry with a reflective surface near the horizon. The instability depends on the spin, on the compactness, and on the reflectivity at the surface. The instability time scale increases only logarithmically in the black-hole limit and, for a perfectly reflecting object, this is not enough to prevent the instability from occurring on dynamical time scales. However, we find that an absorption rate at the surface as small as 0.4% (reflectivity coefficient as large as $|{cal R}|^2=0.996$) is sufficient to quench the instability completely. Our results suggest that exotic compact objects are not necessarily ruled out by the ergoregion instability.
This paper reviews a phenomenological approach to the gravitational lensing by exotic objects such as the Ellis wormhole lens, where exotic lens objects may follow a non-standard form of the equation of state or may obey a modified gravity theory. A gravitational lens model is proposed in the inverse powers of the distance, such that the Schwarzschild lens and exotic lenses can be described in a unified manner as a one parameter family. As observational implications, the magnification, shear, photo-centroid motion and time delay in this lens model are discussed.
Spinning horizonless compact objects may be unstable against an ergoregion instability. We investigate this mechanism for electromagnetic perturbations of ultracompact Kerr-like objects with a reflecting surface, extending previous (numerical and analytical) work limited to the scalar case. We derive an analytical result for the frequency and the instability time scale of unstable modes which is valid at small frequencies. We argue that our analysis can be directly extended to gravitational perturbations of exotic compact objects in the black-hole limit. The instability for electromagnetic and gravitational perturbations is generically stronger than in the scalar case and it requires larger absorption to be quenched. We argue that exotic compact objects with spin $chilesssim 0.7$ ($chilesssim 0.9$) should have an absorption coefficient of at least $0.3%$ ($6%$) to remain linearly stable, and that an absorption coefficient of at least $approx60%$ would quench the instability for any spin. We also show that - in the static limit - the scalar, electromagnetic, and gravitatonal perturbations of the Kerr metric are related to one another through Darboux transformations.