The ringdown of a black hole surrounded by a thin shell of matter
arXiv:2506.00367 · doi:10.1103/gkj4-m1c1
Abstract
Recent studies have shown that far-field perturbations to the curvature potential of a black hole spacetime may destabilize its quasinormal mode (QNM) spectrum while only mildly affecting time-domain ringdown signals. In this work, we study the QNM spectrum and ringdown behavior of a Schwarzschild black hole with a far-field perturbation to its physical environment -- a thin matter shell with finite surface tension. After accounting for the dynamics of the interaction between GWs and the shell, we find that the fundamental mode can migrate perturbatively or be destabilized by the appearance of new modes with no analogue in the vacuum case, much like studies of ``bumps" in the curvature potential. However, unlike these previous works, we find that the coupling between metric perturbations and oscillations of the shell also sources weakly-damped QNMs which are exclusive to the polar sector. We then study whether the analysis tools of least-squares QNM fits and the full and rational ringdown filters can clearly identify the signatures of the shell in representative ringdown waveforms. We conclude that ringdown at sufficiently early times is insensitive to the shell; weakly-damped QNMs (in the polar sector) and echoes, which may enable the analysis methods considered here to infer the presence of a shell, only appear at late times and are generally weak.
arXiv comment26 pages, 12 figures. Submitted to Physical Review D
References in corpus (62)
- Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
- GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
- The NANOGrav 15-year Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-Wave Background
- On gravitational-wave spectroscopy of massive black holes with the space interferometer LISA
- Tests of General Relativity with Binary Black Holes from the second LIGO-Virgo Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog
- Tests of General Relativity with GW170817
- Can environmental effects spoil precision gravitational-wave astrophysics?
- Black Hole Spectroscopy: Testing General Relativity through Gravitational Wave Observations
- Testing the no-hair theorem with GW150914
- Merging black hole binaries in galactic nuclei: implications for advanced-LIGO detections
- Shadow of a black hole surrounded by dark matter
- Analytic black hole perturbation approach to gravitational radiation
- Extreme Gravity Tests with Gravitational Waves from Compact Binary Coalescences: (II) Ringdown
- Quasinormal-mode spectrum of Kerr black holes and its geometric interpretation
- Matched-filtering and parameter estimation of ringdown waveforms
- Detecting dark matter around black holes with gravitational waves: Effects of dark-matter dynamics on the gravitational waveform
- Gravitational signature of Schwarzschild black holes in dynamical Chern-Simons gravity
- Gravitational waves from extreme-mass-ratio systems in astrophysical environments
- Stability analysis of dynamic thin shells
- Pseudospectrum and black hole quasi-normal mode (in)stability
- Gravitational wave signatures of the absence of an event horizon. I. Nonradial oscillations of a thin-shell gravastar
- Nonlinearities in Black Hole Ringdowns
- Destabilizing the Fundamental Mode of Black Holes: The Elephant and the Flea
- Analysis of Ringdown Overtones in GW150914
- Ringdown overtones, black hole spectroscopy, and no-hair theorem tests
- Gravitational wave signatures of black hole quasi-normal mode instability
- On the oscillation spectra of ultracompact stars: An extensive survey of gravitational-wave modes
- Environmental Effects for Gravitational-wave Astrophysics
- Dirty black holes: Quasinormal modes
- Stability of the fundamental quasinormal mode in time-domain observations against small perturbations
- Gravitational waves from the Papaloizou-Pringle instability in black hole-torus systems
- Echoes of compact objects: new physics near the surface and matter at a distance
- Quasinormal Modes of Dirty Black Holes
- Perturbations of spinning black holes beyond General Relativity: Modified Teukolsky equation
- First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. IX. Detection of Near-horizon Circular Polarization
- Extracting linear and nonlinear quasinormal modes from black hole merger simulations
- Quasinormal-mode filters: a new approach to analyze the gravitational-wave ringdown of binary black-hole mergers
- Extreme mass-ratio inspirals into black holes surrounded by scalar clouds
- Black-hole ringdown as a probe of higher-curvature gravity theories
- The Quasinormal Modes of Weakly Charged Kerr-Newman Spacetimes
- Ringdown stability: greybody factors as stable gravitational-wave observables
- Spectral (in)stability of quasinormal modes and strong cosmic censorship
- Black holes surrounded by generic matter distributions: polar perturbations and energy flux
- Black hole spectroscopy by mode cleaning
- Using rational filters to uncover the first ringdown overtone in GW150914
- Quasinormal modes of black holes embedded in halos of matter
- Comment on "Analysis of Ringdown Overtones in GW150914''
- Relativistic shells: Dynamics, horizons, and shell crossing
- Quasinormal modes of Schwarzschild black holes on the real axis
- Overtones and Nonlinearities in Binary Black Hole Ringdowns
- Greybody Factors Imprinted on Black Hole Ringdowns. II. Merging Binary Black Holes
- Quasinormal Modes Beyond Kerr
- ON THE OSCILLATION SPECTRA OF ULTRA COMPACT STARS
- New Generic Ringdown Frequencies at the Birth of a Kerr Black Hole
- Event Horizon Deformations in Extreme Mass-Ratio Black Hole Mergers
- Analyzing black-hole ringdowns II: data conditioning
- Equilibrium and stability of thin spherical shells in Newtonian and relativistic gravity
- Regge pole description of scattering by dirty black holes
- Dynamical Instability of Self-Gravitating Membranes
- Reanalyzing the ringdown signal of GW150914 using the F-statistic method
- Gravitational wave ringdown analysis using the -statistic
- Effect of a low density dust shell on the propagation of gravitational waves