Spectral lines of dirty wormholes

TL;DR

This paper explores how surrounding matter affects the spectral lines of wormholes, revealing that despite environmental influences, key spectral features of the wormhole remain detectable.

Contribution

It introduces the study of astrophysical environment effects on the spectral lines of dirty wormholes, highlighting the persistence of spectral signatures despite surrounding matter.

Findings

New stable light rings can form around dirty wormholes.

Astrophysical matter can alter absorption bands but not hide core spectral features.

Spectral lines largely preserved despite dense surrounding matter.

Abstract

Astrophysical objects like black holes are usually surrounded by matter in the form of accretion disks or jets of matter. These astrophysical scenarios are expected to introduce novel phenomenology in the scattering of particles and fields. Wormholes are viable candidates for exotic compact objects that can mimic some black hole properties. Hence, it is natural to wonder what would happen if the central astrophysical object were a wormhole, instead of a black hole. We investigate the astrophysical environment effect on the absorption of a massless scalar field by a dirty wormhole surrounded by a thick shell of matter. We study null geodesics around these dirty wormholes and analyze under which conditions new pairs of light rings can appear. The presence of new stable light rings allows new quasibound states in the spacetime, apart from the ones trapped near the throat. Thus, the astrophysical environment can introduce deviations in the absorption bands. Remarkably, although heavy and dense distributions of matter are considered surrounding the wormhole, the position of most of the spectral lines in the absorption bands is preserved, indicating that the astrophysical environment cannot hide some fingerprints of the central object.