Giant black hole ringings induced by massive gravity

TL;DR

This paper investigates how massive gravity theories cause Schwarzschild black holes to produce unusually strong and long-lasting gravitational wave ringings, which could be detected to test or constrain graviton mass.

Contribution

It demonstrates that in massive gravity, black hole excitation factors exhibit a strong resonance, leading to giant, slowly decaying gravitational wave ringings.

Findings

Resonant excitation factors cause giant black hole ringings.

Such ringings are potentially observable with future gravitational wave detectors.

These observations could test or constrain massive gravity theories.

Abstract

A distorted black hole radiates gravitational waves in order to settle down in one of the geometries permitted by the no-hair theorem. During that relaxation phase, a characteristic damped ringing is generated. It can be theoretically constructed from the black hole quasinormal frequencies (which govern its oscillating behavior and its decay) and from the associated excitation factors (which determine intrinsically its amplitude) by carefully taking into account the source of the distortion. Here, by considering the Schwarzschild black hole in the framework of massive gravity, we show that the excitation factors have an unexpected strong resonant behavior leading to giant ringings which are, moreover, slowly decaying. Such extraordinary black hole ringings could be observed by the next generations of gravitational wave detectors and allow us to test the various massive gravity theories or their absence could be used to impose strong constraints on the graviton mass.