Piercing of a solitonic boson star by a black hole

TL;DR

This study investigates how a solitonic boson star is pierced and captured by a black hole, revealing that most of the star's material is accreted regardless of initial conditions, with self-interactions not significantly changing the outcome.

Contribution

It extends previous work by including a hexic potential, showing that higher compactness does not prevent the black hole from capturing most of the boson star material.

Findings

Over 85% of boson star material is accreted by the black hole.

Self-interactions do not significantly alter the capture dynamics.

High compactness does not prevent tidal capture.

Abstract

Recently, the piercing of a mini boson star by a black hole was studied, with tidal capture and the discovery of a "gravitational atom" being reported ( arXiv:2206.00021 [gr-qc] ). Building on this research, we extend the study by including a hexic solitonic potential and explore the piercing of a solitonic boson star by a black hole. Notably, the solitonic boson star can reach higher compactness, which one might expect could alter the dynamics in this context. Our findings suggest that even when the black hole's size approaches the test particle limit, the solitonic boson star is easily captured by the black hole due to an extreme tidal capture process. Regardless of the black hole initial mass and velocity, our results indicate that over 85% of the boson star material is accreted. Thus, the self-interaction does not alter the qualitative behavior of the system.