The Sound of Clearing the Throat: Gravitational Waves from a Black Hole Orbiting in a Wormhole Geometry

Abstract: Current ground-based gravitational wave detectors are tuned to capture the collision of compact objects such as stellar origin black holes and neutron stars; over 20 such events have been published to date. Theoretically, however, more exotic compact objects may exist, collisions of which should also generate copious gravitational waves. In this paper, we model the inspiral of a stellar mass black hole into a stable, non-spinning, traversable wormhole, and find a characteristic waveform -- an anti-chirp and/or burst -- as the black hole emerges, i.e., outspirals, into our region of the Universe. This novel waveform signature may be useful in searches for wormholes in future gravitational wave data or used to constrain possible wormhole geometries in our Universe.