English

Killing horizons and surface gravities for a well-behaved three-function generalisation of the Kerr spacetime

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2023-05-16 v3

Abstract

Thanks to the recent advent of the event horizon telescope (EHT), we now have the opportunity to test the physical ramifications of the strong-field near-horizon regime for astrophysical black holes. Herein, emphasizing the trade-off between tractability and generality, the authors discuss a particularly powerful three-function distortion of the Kerr spacetime, depending on three arbitrary functions of the radial coordinate rr, which on the one hand can be fit to future observational data, and on the other hand is sufficiently general so as to encompass an extremely wide class of theoretical models. In all of these spacetimes, both the timelike Hamilton--Jacobi (geodesic) and massive Klein--Gordon (wave) equations separate, and the spacetime geometry is asymptotically Kerr; hence these spacetimes are well-suited to modelling real astrophysical black holes. The authors then prove the existence of Killing horizons for this entire class of spacetimes, and give tractable expressions for the angular velocities, areas, and surface gravities of these horizons. We emphasize the validity of rigidity results and zeroth laws for these horizons.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2303.07380,
  title  = {Killing horizons and surface gravities for a well-behaved three-function generalisation of the Kerr spacetime},
  author = {Joshua Baines and Matt Visser},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.07380},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

V1: 24 pages, no figures. V2: Two references added, minor changes in presentation. No changes in the physics. V3: Now 28 pages. Extra discussion and references; no changes in the physics. This version closely resembles the published version