Understand
The Einstein Telescope (ET), a proposed third-generation gravitational wave observatory, would enable tests of the no-hair theorem by looking at the characteristic frequencies and damping times of black hole ringdown signals.
- In previous work it was shown that with a single $500 - 1000\,M_\odot$ black hole at distance $\lesssim 6$ Gpc (or redshift $z \lesssim 1$), deviations of a few percent in the frequencies and damping times of dominant and sub-dominant modes would be within the range of detectability.
- Given that such sources may be relatively rare, it is of interest to see how well the no-hair theorem can be tested with events at much larger distances and with smaller signal-to-noise ratios, thus accessing a far bigger volume of space and a larger number of sources.
- We employ a model selection scheme called TIGER (Test Infrastructure for GEneral Relativity), which was originally developed to test general relativity with weak binary coalescence signals that will be seen in second-generation detectors such as Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo.