2022/06/06 by J. Calderón Bustillo, Bustillo, Juan Calderon, N. Sanchis-Gual +17 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Statistical Mechanics and Entropy
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2206.02551
openalex publication_date 2022/06/06 · openalex created_date 2022/06/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
We present the first systematic search for exotic compact mergers in Advanced LIGO and Virgo events. We compare the short gravitational-wave signals GW190521, GW190426_190642, GW200220_061928 and the trigger 200114_020818 (or S200114f) to a new catalogue of 759 numerical simulations of head-on mergers of horizonless exotic compact objects known as Proca stars, interpreted as self-gravitating lumps of (fuzzy) dark matter sourced by an ultralight (vector) bosonic particle. The Proca-star merger hypothesis is strongly rejected with respect to the black hole merger one by GW190426, weakly rejected by GW200220 and weakly favoured by GW190521 and S200114f. GW190521 and GW200220 yield highly consistent boson masses of μ\rm B = 8.69+0.61-0.75×10-13 eV and μ\rm B = 9.13+1.18-1.30×10-13 eV at the 90% credible level. We conduct a preliminary population study of the compact binaries behind these events. Excluding (including) S200114f as a real event, and ignoring boson-mass consistencies across events, we estimate a fraction of Proca-star mergers of ζ= 0.27+0.43-0.25 (0.39+0.38-0.33). We discuss the impact of boson-mass consistency across events in such estimates. Our results maintain GW190521 as a Proca-star merger candidate and pave the way towards population studies considering exotic compact objects.