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Supermassive black holes or boson stars? Hair counting with gravitational wave detectors

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arxiv gr-qc/0605101 v1 pith:V63UPNGE submitted 2006-05-17 gr-qc astro-ph

classification gr-qcastro-ph
keywords supermassiveblackbosonkerrtheoremfirstgravitationalhair
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The evidence for supermassive Kerr black holes in galactic centers is strong and growing, but only the detection of gravitational waves will convincingly rule out other possibilities to explain the observations. The Kerr spacetime is completely specified by the first two multipole moments: mass and angular momentum. This is usually referred to as the ``no-hair theorem'', but it is really a ``two-hair'' theorem. If general relativity is the correct theory of gravity, the most plausible alternative to a supermassive Kerr black hole is a rotating boson star. Numerical calculations indicate that the spacetime of rotating boson stars is determined by the first three multipole moments (``three-hair theorem''). LISA could accurately measure the oscillation frequencies of these supermassive objects. We propose to use these measurements to ``count their hair'', unambiguously determining their nature and properties.

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Forward citations

Cited by 2 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 60 citations worldwide. Full citation record

  1. Testing the nature of compact objects in the lower mass gap using gravitational wave observations

    astro-ph.HE 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Simulated low-mass-gap boson star binaries are severely mis-measured when analyzed with black hole waveform models, but a model including both spin-induced quadrupole and tidal effects recovers the correct masses.

  2. Dynamical Boson Stars

    gr-qc 2012-02 unverdicted novelty 2.0 of 10

    Boson stars are particle-like solutions in general relativity that model dark matter, black hole mimickers, and binary systems.

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