Gravitational wave echoes through new windows

Abstract

There has been a striking realization that physics resolving the black hole information paradox could imply postmerger gravitational wave echoes. We here report on evidence for echoes from the LIGO compact binary merger events, GW151226, GW170104, GW170608, GW170814, as well as the neutron star merger GW170817. There is a signal for each event with a $p$-value of order 1% or sometimes significantly less. Our study begins with the comparison of echoes from a variety of horizonless exotic compact objects. Next we investigate the effects of spin. The identification of the more generic features of echoes then leads to the development of relatively simple windowing methods, in both time and frequency space, to extract a signal from noise. The time delay between echoes is inversely related to the spacing between the spectral resonances, and it is advantageous to look directly for this resonance structure. We find time delays for the first four events that are consistent with a simple model that accounts for mass and spin of the final object, while for the neutron star merger the final mass and spin are constrained.