Related papers: Exotic Compact Objects and How to Quench their Erg…
The instability of rotating Kerr black holes due to massive scalar perturbations is investigated. It is well known that a bosonic field impinging on a Kerr black hole can be amplified as it scatters off the hole. This superradiant…
Gravitational waves open the possibility to investigate the nature of compact objects and probe the horizons of black holes. Some models of modified gravity predict the presence of horizonless and singularity-free compact objects. Such dark…
In several approaches to evading the information paradox, the semiclassical black hole is replaced by an Exotic Compact Object (ECO). It has been conjectured that gravitational waves emitted by the merger of ECOs can reflect off the ECOs…
We demonstrate that generically an accretion disk around a compact object could have a new type of instability in that the accretion flow need not be symmetric with respect to the equatorial plane even when matter is supplied symmetrically…
Recent investigations of the pseudospectrum in black hole spacetimes have shown that quasinormal mode frequencies suffer from spectral instabilities. This phenomenon may severely affect gravitational-wave spectroscopy and limit precision…
The Kerr spacetime is symmetric with respect to a well-defined equatorial plane. When testing the equatorial reflection symmetry of an isolated black hole, one is at the same time testing the Kerr hypothesis in General Relativity. In this…
One of the main predictions of general relativity is the existence of black holes featuring a horizon beyond which nothing can escape. Gravitational waves from the remnants of compact binary coalescences have the potential to probe new…
Magnetic fields surrounding spinning black holes can confine radiation and trigger superradiant instabilities. To investigate this effect, we perform the first fully-consistent linear analysis of the Ernst spacetime, an exact solution of…
Quantum gravitational effects on the near horizon may alter the black hole's horizon drastically to be partially reflective, portrayed by a quantum membrane. With this modification, the object can be considered as an exotic compact object…
Astrophysical black holes are embedded in surrounding dark and baryonic matter that can measurably perturb the spacetime. We construct a self-consistent spacetime describing a slowly rotating black hole embedded in an external matter…
Beyond black holes and neutron stars, new hypothetical compact objects have been proposed as potential astrophysical entities. In general, their properties have not yet been fully explored or understood, nor has it been proven whether or…
Ultracompact spinning horizonless spacetimes with ergoregions are subject to the ergoregion instability. We systematically investigate the instability of a massless scalar field in a variety of rapidly spinning Proca stars and boson stars…
The characteristic difference between a black hole and other exotic compact objects (ECOs) is the presence of the horizon. The horizon of a classical black hole acts as a one-way membrane. Due to this nature, any perturbation on the black…
Very compact objects probe extreme gravitational fields and may be the key to understand outstanding puzzles in fundamental physics. These include the nature of dark matter, the fate of spacetime singularities, or the loss of unitarity in…
Extreme-mass-ratio inspirals, in which a stellar-mass object orbits a supermassive black hole, are prime sources of millihertz gravitational waves for upcoming space-based detectors. While most studies assume idealized vacuum backgrounds,…
Motivated by the lack of a general parametrization for exotic compact objects, we construct a class of perturbative solutions valid for small (but otherwise generic) multipolar deviations from a Schwarzschild metric in general relativity.…
Non-singular horizonless ultracompact objects provide a simple resolution to the black holes singularity problem. It has been shown that, if these objects are compact enough to exhibit the presence of the light-ring required to mimic the…
We study extreme mass ratio inspirals occurring in modified gravity, for which the system is modeled by a small compact object with scalar charge spiraling into a supermassive Kerr black hole. Besides the tensorial gravitational waves…
Gravitational waves from binary coalescences provide one of the cleanest signatures of the nature of compact objects. It has been recently argued that the post-merger ringdown waveform of exotic ultracompact objects is initially identical…
Black holes hold a tremendous discovery potential. In this paper the extent to which the Event Horizon Telescope and its next generation upgrade can resolve their structure is quantified. Black holes are characterized by a perfectly…