Related papers: Black Hole Echology: The Observer's Manual
Merging binary black holes exhibit a ringdown phase in which they primarily emit gravitational waves in the shape of damped sinusoids corresponding to quasi-normal modes of the Kerr remnant. In general, each mode carries four degrees of…
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…
Gravitational waves (GW) from eccentric binaries have intricate signals encoding important features about the location, creation and evolution of the sources. Eccentricity shortens the merger time, making the emitted GW statistically…
Gravitational waves from precessing binary black holes exhibit new features that are absent in non-precessionary systems. All current waveform models take into account only the modulation of the signal due to precession. In this letter, we…
The first direct observation of a binary neutron star (BNS) merger was a watershed moment in multi-messenger astronomy. However, gravitational waves from GW170817 have only been observed prior to the BNS merger, but electromagnetic…
Gravitational waves enable tests of general relativity in the highly dynamical and strong-field regime. Using events detected by LIGO-Virgo up to 1 October 2019, we evaluate the consistency of the data with predictions from the theory. We…
The orbital eccentricity of a merging binary black hole leaves an imprint on the associated gravitational-wave signal that can reveal whether the binary formed in isolation or in a dynamical environment, such as the core of a dense star…
In the context of higher dimensional braneworld scenario, we have argued that the occurrence of horizonless exotic compact objects, as an alternative to classical black holes, are more natural. These exotic compact objects carry a…
The event horizon of a black hole in general relativity absorbs all infalling radiation. Any observation of the contrary would immediately challenge the expectation that astrophysical black holes are described by the vacuum Kerr geometry.…
Gravitational-wave detectors can search for yet-undiscovered ultralight bosons, including those conjectured to solve problems in particle physics, high-energy theory and cosmology. Ground-based instruments could probe boson masses between…
Mergers of stellar-mass black holes (BHs), such as GW150914 observed by LIGO, are not expected to have electromagnetic counterparts. However, the Fermi GBM detector identified of a gamma-ray transient 0.4 s after the gravitational wave (GW)…
Einstein Telescope (ET) is a third-generation gravitational wave (GW) detector with tenfold better sensitivity compared to the advanced LIGO detectors. It will be capable of observing copious stellar mass binary black hole mergers up to a…
Black holes are unique among astrophysical sources: they are the simplest macroscopic objects in the Universe, and they are extraordinary in terms of their ability to convert energy into electromagnetic and gravitational radiation. Our…
In fall of 2015, the two LIGO detectors measured the gravitational wave signal GW150914, which originated from a pair of merging black holes. In the final 0.2 seconds (about 8 gravitational-wave cycles) before the amplitude reached its…
We report on evidence for black hole spindown in the light curves of the BATSE catalogue of 1491 long GRBs by application of matched filtering. This observation points to a strong interaction of the black hole with surrounding high density…
Despite the growing number of confident binary black hole coalescences observed through gravitational waves so far, the astrophysical origin of these binaries remains uncertain. Orbital eccentricity is one of the clearest tracers of binary…
We describe the main scientific developments that lead LIGO project to the detection of the gravitational waves: general relativity, black holes and gravitational waves predictions; numerical relativity and the collision and coalescence…
We study axial gravitational perturbations of a hairy black hole constructed in the framework of gravitational decoupling and investigate the geometric origin of echo-like late-time signals in this spacetime. We derive the odd-parity master…
We analyze a rotating regular black hole spacetime with an asymptotically Minkowski core, focusing on extreme mass-ratio inspiral (EMRIs) where a stellar-mass object inspirals a supermassive black hole under consideration. Such spacetimes…
Orbital eccentricity is one of the most robust discriminators for distinguishing between dynamical and isolated formation scenarios of binary black hole mergers using gravitational-wave observatories such as LIGO and Virgo. Using…