No Love for black holes: tightest constraints on tidal Love numbers of black holes from GW250114

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Auteurs principaux: Andrés-Carcasona, M., Santoro, G. Caneva
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Andrés-Carcasona, M.
Santoro, G. Caneva
author_facet Andrés-Carcasona, M.
Santoro, G. Caneva
contents Tidal Love numbers of black holes, zero in classical general relativity for Kerr black holes in vacuum, become non-vanishing in the presence of exotic matter or in alternative theories of gravity, making them a powerful probe of fundamental physics. The gravitational-wave event GW250114, observed with an unprecedented signal-to-noise ratio, provides a unique opportunity to test this prediction. By analyzing this event, we conclude that the data is consistent with the binary black hole hypothesis, and we place a 90\% upper limit on the effective tidal deformability of $\tildeΛ < 34.8$. These bounds imply that any environment surrounding the black holes must contribute less than $\sim 7\times 10^{-3}$ of their mass, and they rule out some models of boson stars. Our findings provide the strongest observational constraints yet on black hole tidal deformability and show that the data remain fully consistent with the Kerr black hole prediction of vanishing tidal Love numbers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_01918
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle No Love for black holes: tightest constraints on tidal Love numbers of black holes from GW250114
Andrés-Carcasona, M.
Santoro, G. Caneva
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Tidal Love numbers of black holes, zero in classical general relativity for Kerr black holes in vacuum, become non-vanishing in the presence of exotic matter or in alternative theories of gravity, making them a powerful probe of fundamental physics. The gravitational-wave event GW250114, observed with an unprecedented signal-to-noise ratio, provides a unique opportunity to test this prediction. By analyzing this event, we conclude that the data is consistent with the binary black hole hypothesis, and we place a 90\% upper limit on the effective tidal deformability of $\tildeΛ < 34.8$. These bounds imply that any environment surrounding the black holes must contribute less than $\sim 7\times 10^{-3}$ of their mass, and they rule out some models of boson stars. Our findings provide the strongest observational constraints yet on black hole tidal deformability and show that the data remain fully consistent with the Kerr black hole prediction of vanishing tidal Love numbers.
title No Love for black holes: tightest constraints on tidal Love numbers of black holes from GW250114
topic General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01918