Distinguishing boson stars from black holes and neutron stars with tidal interactions

Document #:

LIGO-G1701245-v1

Document type:

G - Presentations (eg Graphics)

Abstract:

Binary systems containing boson stars---self-gravitating configurations of a complex scalar field---can potentially mimic black holes or neutron stars as gravitational-wave sources. We investigate the extent to which tidal effects in the gravitational-wave signal can be used to discriminate between these standard sources and boson stars. First, we compute the tidal deformability parameter characterizing the dominant tidal imprint in the gravitational-wave signals for two boson star models. Employing a Fisher matrix analysis, we estimate the precision with which Advanced LIGO and third-generation detectors can measure these tidal parameters using the inspiral portion of the signal. We discuss a novel strategy to improve the distinguishability between black holes/neutrons stars and boson stars by combining tidal deformability measurements of each compact object in a binary system, thereby eliminating the scaling ambiguities in each boson star model. Our analysis suggests that current-generation detectors can potentially distinguish certain models of boson stars from black holes, as well as from neutron-star binaries if they have either a large total mass or a large (asymmetric) mass ratio. Discriminating very compact boson stars from black holes using only tidal effects will be difficult with Advanced LIGO, but third-generation detectors should be able to distinguish between binary black holes and these binary boson stars.

Files in Document:

• Slides (Sennett_BS_Talk.pdf, 1.7 MB)

Topics:

• Compact Binaries

Authors:

• Noah Sennett
• Tanja Hinderer
• Jan Steinhoff
• Alessandra Buonanno
• Serguei Ossokine

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Associated with Events:

Amaldi 12 held on 09 Jul 2017 in Hilton Hotel, Pasadena, CA