Gravitational Waves from a Black Hole Oribiting and Traversing a Wormhole

Current ground-based gravitational wave detectors measure the collision of compact objects such as black holes and neutron stars. More exotic compact objects may exist, collisions of which should also generate copious gravitational waves. 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, outspirals into our region of the Universe, and inspirals again losing energy to gravitational waves and settling on to the wormhole throat. This signature can be useful in searches for wormholes in existing and future data or used to constrain wormhole populations and geometries.