The Axial Gravitational Ringing of a Spherically Symmetric Black Hole Surrounded by Dark Matter Spike

Abstract

Supermassive black holes at the center of each galaxy may be surrounded by dark matter. Such dark matter admits a spike structure and vanishes at a certain distance from the black hole. This dark matter will impact the spacetime near the black hole and the related ringing gravitational waves can show distinguished features of the black hole without dark matter. In the present work, we focus on the quasi-normal modes of the axial gravitational perturbation who dominate the ringdown process of the perturbed black holes surrounded by dark matter spikes. The relativistic modification results in less impact on QNMs. And the relative ringing frequency difference between the black holes with and without dark matter can be as large as $10^{-2}$. These features can be used in future gravitational wave detection about extremal mass ratio inspiral systems to probe the existence of dark matter around supermassive black holes.