Gravitational waves from a black hole orbiting in a wormhole geometry

Abstract

Current ground-based gravitational wave detectors are tuned to observe compact object mergers from stellar mass black holes and neutron stars; ~50 such events have been published to date. More exotic compact objects may exist, collisions of which would also generate copious gravitational waves. In this work, we model a stellar mass black hole inspiral into a stable, nonspinning, traversable wormhole, and find a characteristic waveform—an antichirp and/or burst—as the black hole outspirals into our region of the Universe. This is a characteristic signature which can be useful in wormhole searches in gravitational wave data or used to constrain wormhole geometries.