The Sound of Clearing the Throat: Gravitational Waves from a Black Hole Orbiting in a Wormhole Geometry

Understand

Current ground-based gravitational wave detectors are tuned to capture the collision of compact objects such as stellar origin black holes and neutron stars; over 20 such events have been published to date.

• Theoretically, however, more exotic compact objects may exist, collisions of which should also generate copious gravitational waves.
• In this paper, we model the inspiral of a stellar mass black hole into a stable, non-spinning, traversable wormhole, and find a characteristic waveform -- an anti-chirp and/or burst -- as the black hole emerges, i.e., outspirals, into our region of the Universe.
• This novel waveform signature may be useful in searches for wormholes in future gravitational wave data or used to constrain possible wormhole geometries in our Universe.