Modeling gravitational waves from exotic compact objects

TL;DR

This paper introduces a toy model for exotic compact objects (ECOs) to evaluate their gravitational wave signatures, assess their detectability with current and future detectors, and explore how they differ from black hole signals.

Contribution

The paper presents a simplified model for ECO binaries, analyzes their gravitational wave signals, and evaluates the potential to distinguish them from black holes using advanced detectors.

Findings

Einstein Telescope and LISA can detect ECO binaries across the universe.

Using black hole templates may reduce detection efficiency by up to 60%.

LIGO/Virgo O1/O2 events are unlikely to be ECO binaries based on post-merger signals.

Abstract

Exotic compact objects can be difficult to distinguish from black holes in the inspiral phase of the binaries observed by gravitational-wave detectors, but significant differences may be present in the merger and post-merger signal. We introduce a toy model capturing the salient features of binaries of exotic compact objects with compactness below $0.2$, which do not collapse promptly following the merger. We use it to assess their detectability with current and future detectors, and whether they can be distinguished from black hole binaries. We find that the Einstein Telescope (LISA) could observe exotic binaries with total mass $\mathcal{O}(10^2) \ M_{\odot}$ ($10^4-10^6 \ M_{\odot}$), and potentially distinguish them from black hole binaries, throughout the observable Universe, as compared to $z\lesssim 1$ for Advanced LIGO. Moreover, we show that using standard black hole templates for detection could lead to a loss of up to $60\%$ in the signal-to-noise ratio, greatly reducing our chances of observing these signals. Finally, we estimate that if the loudest events in the O1/O2 catalog released by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration were ECO binaries as the ones considered in this paper, they would have left a post-merger signal detectable with model-agnostic searches, making this hypothesis unlikely.