Spherical Boson Stars as Black Hole mimickers

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that spherically symmetric boson stars can mimic black hole accretion disk spectra across various scales, and explores potential observational differences through light deflection.

Contribution

It introduces boson star configurations that replicate black hole accretion spectra and analyzes their distinguishability via light deflection.

Findings

Boson stars can mimic black hole power spectra for the same mass.

A single boson star configuration can mimic black holes at different scales.

Light deflection studies suggest possible observational differences.

Abstract

We present spherically symmetric boson stars as black hole mimickers based on the power spectrum of a simple accretion disk model. The free parameters of the boson star are the mass of the boson and the fourth order self-interaction coefficient in the scalar field potential. We show that even if the mass of the boson is the only free parameter it is possible to find a configuration that mimics the power spectrum of the disk due to a black hole of the same mass. We also show that for each value of the self-interaction a single boson star configuration can mimic a black hole at very different astrophysical scales in terms of the mass of the object and the accretion rate. In order to show that it is possible to distinguish one of our mimickers from a black hole we also study the deflection of light.