Ringdown stability: Graybody factors as stable gravitational-wave observables

The quasinormal mode spectrum of black holes plays a crucial role in the modeling of postmerger ringdown signals. However, the spectrum is extremely sensitive to small deformations of the system and describes the linear response only in a certain (not precisely defined) time frame after the merger. We argue here that the graybody factors, recently shown to describe the ringdown spectral amplitude at relatively high frequencies, are instead stable under small perturbations of the system and free of certain ambiguities that plague the quasinormal mode spectrum. Our analysis also unveils a nontrivial interplay: While certain ringdown quantities are dominated by the contribution of spectrally unstable quasinormal modes, these modes conspire to produce stable observables. Thus, we propose a complementary approach to ringdown studies, which circumvents some limitations of the standard quasinormal mode description.