Quasinormal modes of slowly-spinning horizonless compact objects

TL;DR

This paper extends the membrane paradigm to analyze quasinormal modes of slowly-spinning horizonless compact objects, revealing how spin and reflectivity influence their gravitational wave signatures and potential deviations from black holes.

Contribution

It introduces a linear-order spin extension of the membrane paradigm to study quasinormal modes of horizonless objects, highlighting effects on isospectrality and stability.

Findings

Breaking of isospectrality between axial and polar modes.

Modes tend towards instability with increasing spin.

Spin amplifies deviations from black hole quasinormal modes.

Abstract

One of the main predictions of general relativity is the existence of black holes featuring a horizon beyond which nothing can escape. Gravitational waves from the remnants of compact binary coalescences have the potential to probe new physics close to the black hole horizons. This prospect is of particular interest given several quantum-gravity models that predict the presence of horizonless and singularity-free compact objects. The membrane paradigm is a generic framework that allows one to parametrise the interior of compact objects in terms of the properties of a fictitious fluid located at the object's radius. It has been used to derive the quasinormal mode spectrum of static horizonless compact objects. Extending the membrane paradigm to rotating objects is crucial to constrain the properties of the spinning merger remnants. In this work, we extend the membrane paradigm to linear order in spin and use it to analyse the relationships between the quasi-normal modes, the object's reflectivity, and the membrane parameters. We find a breaking of isospectrality between axial and polar modes when the object is partially reflecting or the compactness differs from the black hole case. We also find that in reflective ultracompact objects some of the modes tend towards instability as the spin increases. Finally, we show that the spin enhances the deviations from the black-hole quasinormal mode spectrum as the compactness decreases. This implies that spinning horizonless compact objects may be more easily differentiated than nonspinning ones in the prompt ringdown.