English

A "no-hair" test for binary black holes

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2019-05-29 v1

Abstract

One of the consequences of the black-hole "no-hair" theorem in general relativity (GR) is that gravitational radiation (quasi-normal modes) from a perturbed Kerr black hole is uniquely determined by its mass and spin. Thus, the spectrum of quasi-normal mode frequencies have to be all consistent with the same value of the mass and spin. Similarly, the gravitational radiation from a coalescing binary black hole system is uniquely determined by a small number of parameters (masses and spins of the black holes and orbital parameters). Thus, consistency between different spherical harmonic modes of the radiation is a powerful test that the observed system is a binary black hole predicted by GR. We formulate such a test, develop a Bayesian implementation, demonstrate its performance on simulated data and investigate the possibility of performing such a test using previous and upcoming gravitational wave observations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1804.03297,
  title  = {A "no-hair" test for binary black holes},
  author = {Siddharth Dhanpal and Abhirup Ghosh and Ajit Kumar Mehta and Parameswaran Ajith and B. S. Sathyaprakash},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.03297},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

5 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:18:45.021Z