English

How fast can a black hole rotate?

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2015-12-09 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

Kerr black holes have their angular momentum, JJ, bounded by their mass, MM: JcGM2Jc\leqslant GM^2. There are, however, known black hole solutions violating this Kerr bound. We propose a very simple universal bound on the rotation, rather than on the angular momentum, of four-dimensional, stationary and axisymmetric, asymptotically flat black holes, given in terms of an appropriately defined horizon linear velocity, vHv_H. The vHv_H bound is simply that vHv_H cannot exceed the velocity of light. We verify the vHv_H bound for known black hole solutions, including some that violate the Kerr bound, and conjecture that only extremal Kerr black holes saturate the vHv_H bound.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1505.04189,
  title  = {How fast can a black hole rotate?},
  author = {Carlos A. R. Herdeiro and Eugen Radu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.04189},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

10 pages, 2 figures, Essay written for the Gravity Research Foundation 2015 Awards for Essays on Gravitation and selected for Honorable Mention

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:35:14.968Z