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Physical Review D

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Inspirals into bosonic dark matter stars and chirp mimickers

Caio F. B. Macedo ^1,*, Haroldo C. D. Lima ², Raissa F. P. Mendes ^3,4, Rodrigo Vicente ⁵, and Vitor Cardoso ^6,7

¹Faculdade de Física, Campus de Salinópolis, Universidade Federal do Pará, Salinópolis, Pará, 68721-000 Brazil
²Programa de Pós-Graduação em Física, Universidade Federal do Maranhão, Campus Universitãrio do Bacanga, 65080-805, São Luís, Maranhão, Brazil
³Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, 24210-346, Brazil
⁴CBPF–Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas, 22290-180, Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
⁵Gravitation Astroparticle Physics Amsterdam (GRAPPA), University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
⁶Center of Gravity, Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark
⁷CENTRA, Departamento de Física, Instituto Superior Técnico–IST, Universidade de Lisboa–UL, Avenida Rovisco Pais 1, 1049 Lisboa, Portugal

^*Contact author: caiomacedo@ufpa.br

Phys. Rev. D 114, 064024 – Published 8 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/yhys-wbwf

Abstract

We investigate extreme-mass-ratio inspirals in which a stellar-mass compact object orbits a supermassive bosonic dark matter star, modeled as a boson star, using fully relativistic perturbative methods. Unlike inspirals around electro-vacuum black holes, these systems can shed scalar matter through dynamical friction which significantly alters the inspiral dynamics. We show that this additional dissipation can induce a chirplike gravitational-wave signal closely resembling that of black hole binaries, allowing boson stars to act as gravitational-wave chirp mimickers even when they are not ultracompact. The inspiral evolution and resulting waveform depend sensitively on the compactness of the central boson star: highly compact configurations trigger dipolar scalar radiation, leading to a rapid plunge, whereas less compact stars yield smoother inspirals dominated by gravitational and quadrupolar scalar waves. To support waveform modeling, we derive semianalytical prescriptions for the gravitational and scalar energy fluxes that remain accurate deep into the relativistic regime. Our findings indicate that future space-based detectors such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna could distinguish these mimicker signals from true black hole inspirals through measurable phase dephasings induced by scalar dissipation.

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