Peaking into the abyss: Characterizing the merger of equatorial-eccentric-geodesic plunges in rotating black holes

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Autori principali: Faggioli, Guglielmo, van de Meent, Maarten, Buonanno, Alessandra, Khanna, Gaurav
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Faggioli, Guglielmo
van de Meent, Maarten
Buonanno, Alessandra
Khanna, Gaurav
author_facet Faggioli, Guglielmo
van de Meent, Maarten
Buonanno, Alessandra
Khanna, Gaurav
contents We study the gravitational waveforms generated by critical, equatorial plunging geodesics of the Kerr metric that start from an unstable-circular-orbit, which describe the test-mass limit of spin-aligned eccentric black-hole mergers. The waveforms are generated employing a time-domain Teukolsky code. We span different values of the Kerr spin $-0.99 \le a \le 0.99 $ and of the critical eccentricity $e_c$, for bound ($0 \le e_c<1$) and unbound plunges ($e_c \ge 1$). We find that, contrary to expectations, the waveform modes $h_{\ell m}$ do not always manifest a peak for high eccentricities or spins. In case of the dominant $h_{22}$ mode, we determine the precise region of the parameter space in which its peak exists. In this region, we provide a characterization of the merger quantities of the $h_{22}$ mode and of the higher-order modes, providing the merger structure of the equatorial eccentric plunges of the Kerr spacetime in the test-mass limit.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_05870
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Peaking into the abyss: Characterizing the merger of equatorial-eccentric-geodesic plunges in rotating black holes
Faggioli, Guglielmo
van de Meent, Maarten
Buonanno, Alessandra
Khanna, Gaurav
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
We study the gravitational waveforms generated by critical, equatorial plunging geodesics of the Kerr metric that start from an unstable-circular-orbit, which describe the test-mass limit of spin-aligned eccentric black-hole mergers. The waveforms are generated employing a time-domain Teukolsky code. We span different values of the Kerr spin $-0.99 \le a \le 0.99 $ and of the critical eccentricity $e_c$, for bound ($0 \le e_c<1$) and unbound plunges ($e_c \ge 1$). We find that, contrary to expectations, the waveform modes $h_{\ell m}$ do not always manifest a peak for high eccentricities or spins. In case of the dominant $h_{22}$ mode, we determine the precise region of the parameter space in which its peak exists. In this region, we provide a characterization of the merger quantities of the $h_{22}$ mode and of the higher-order modes, providing the merger structure of the equatorial eccentric plunges of the Kerr spacetime in the test-mass limit.
title Peaking into the abyss: Characterizing the merger of equatorial-eccentric-geodesic plunges in rotating black holes
topic General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05870