A "no-hair" test for binary black holes
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.
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