Galactic wormholes: Geometry, stability, and echoes

TL;DR

This paper investigates how galactic environments, especially dark matter halos, influence wormhole geometry, stability, and gravitational wave echoes, suggesting these wormholes could mimic supermassive black holes and be detectable via future gravitational wave observations.

Contribution

It introduces the effects of galactic environments on wormhole stability and echoes, highlighting observable signatures and stability differences between wormhole types in a galactic setting.

Findings

Dark matter halos can stabilize certain wormholes

Galactic environment affects gravitational wave echoes

Dark matter influences photon sphere and shadow properties

Abstract

In this work, we present the environmental effects on wormholes residing in a galaxy. By this, we propose that these wormholes are mimickers of supermassive black holes residing at the galactic centers. In particular, we consider two wormhole spacetimes classes: the Damour-Solodukhin wormhole and the braneworld wormhole. While there is no classical matter model for the Damour-Solodukhin wormhole, the braneworld wormhole, on the other hand, is supported by a scalar-tensor theory on the four-dimensional brane. Intriguingly, it turns out that the presence of a dark matter halo surrounding these wormholes can tame the violations of energy conditions present in generic wormhole spacetimes. Our results also demonstrate that the galactic Damour-Solodukhin wormhole is more stable than its isolated counterpart under linear scalar perturbation, whereas we obtain the opposite behavior for the braneworld wormhole. The perturbation of these wormholes leads to echoes in the ringdown waveform, which are sensitive to the properties of the dark matter halo. To be precise, the time delay between two echoes is affected by the galactic matter environment, and it appears to be a generic effect present for any exotic compact object living in a galaxy. This allows us to identify the galactic parameters, independently from the gravitational wave measurements, if echoes are observed in future generations of gravitational wave detectors. For completeness, we have also analyzed the impact of the galactic environment on the photon sphere, the innermost stable circular orbits, and the shadow radius. It turns out that the dark matter halo indeed affects these locations, with implications for shadow and accretion physics.