Black Holes Lessons from Multipole Ratios

Abstract: We explain in detail how to calculate the gravitational mass and angular momentum multipoles of the most general non-extremal four-dimensional black hole with four magnetic and four electric charges. We also calculate these multipoles for generic supersymmetric four-dimensional microstate geometries and multi-center solutions. Both for Kerr black holes and BPS black holes many of these multipoles vanish. However, if one embeds these black holes in String Theory and slightly deforms them, one can calculate an infinite set of ratios of vanishing multipoles which remain finite as the deformation is taken away, and whose values are independent of the direction of deformation. For supersymmetric black holes, we can also compute these ratios by taking the scaling limit of multi-center solutions, and for certain black holes the ratios computed using the two methods agree spectacularly. For the Kerr black hole, these ratios pose strong constraints on the parameterization of possible deviations away from the Kerr geometry that should be tested by future gravitational wave interferometers.