Abstract

Most of the properties of black holes can be mimicked by horizonless compact objects such as gravastars and boson stars. We show that these ultracompact objects develop a strong ergoregion instability when rapidly spinning. Instability time scales can be of the order of 0.1 seconds to 1 week for objects with mass M=1-106M⊙ and angular momentum J > 0.4M2. This provides a strong indication that ultracompact objects with large rotation are black holes. Explosive events due to ergoregion instability have a well-defined gravitational-wave signature. These events could be detected by next-generation gravitational-wave detectors such as Advanced LIGO or LISA.

Department(s)

Physics

Sponsor(s)

National Science Foundation (U.S.)
FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia)

Comments

This work was partially funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT)- Portugal through Projects No. PTDC/FIS/64175/2006 and No. POCI/FP/81915/2007. M. C. gratefully acknowledges the support of the National Science Foundation through LIGO Research Support Grant No. NSF PHY-0757937.

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

1550-7998

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Final Version

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2008 American Physical Society (APS), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jun 2008

Included in

Physics Commons

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