We explore the gravitational-wave phenomenology of equal-mass inspiralling boson-star binaries using numerical relativity simulations. In particular, we characterize the waveform differences between binary boson-star and black-hole systems across (i) the early inspiral, by matching our waveforms to post-Newtonian expressions, (ii) merger, and (iii) late ringdown, by extracting the quasinormal mode frequencies of the remnants. We find that boson-star binaries exhibit the largest deviations from comparable binary black-hole systems during the late inspiral and merger phases. Remarkably, for a subset of these equal-mass boson-star binaries (with certain phase offsets in the scalar-field profiles), we identify the excitation of subdominant odd $m$-multipoles in the gravitational-wave emission, absent in equal-mass nonspinning black-hole binaries. Despite differences in the phenomenology of binary boson-star and black-hole signals, injections of some boson-star signals into detector noise exhibit degeneracy with current waveform approximants. Building on these results, we demonstrate how inspiral-merger-ringdown consistency tests can overcome these degeneracies.

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• General relativity
• Gravitational waves
• Binary stars
• Gravitational wave detectors
• Numerical relativity