Testing the existence of regions of stable orbits at small radii around black hole candidates

Black hole candidates in X-ray binary systems and at the centers of galaxies are expected to be the Kerr black holes of general relativity, but the actual nature of these objects has yet to be verified. In this paper, we consider the possibility that they are exotic compact objects and we describe their exterior gravitational field with a subclass of the Manko-Novikov metrics, which are exact solutions of the vacuum Einstein's equations and can describe the spacetime geometry around bodies with arbitrary mass-multipole moments. We point out that around a Manko-Novikov object there may exist many disconnected nonplunging regions at small radii, with no counterpart in the Kerr background, and that their existence may be tested. For instance, in the presence of an accretion disk, they may be filled by the accreting gas, forming a ring structure that might remind the one of the rings of Saturn. We suggest that the existence of these regions may have a clear observational signature in the waveform of the gravitational radiation emitted by an extreme-mass-ratio inspiral: in the last stage of the inspiral, the waveform would be the combination of "regular chirps,'' produced when the small object orbits in one of the nonplunging regions, and "bursts,'' which are released when the small object jumps from a nonplunging region to another one at smaller radii. Our conclusions are supported by some numerical calculations of trajectories in the geodesic approximation, in which a particle plunges from the innermost stable circular orbit and then seems to get trapped in the potential well at smaller radii. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.87.083006