English

Spinning super-massive objects in galactic nuclei up to $a_* > 1$

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2011-05-24 v2 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

Nowadays we believe that a typical galaxy contains about 10710^7 stellar-mass black holes and a single super-massive black hole at its center. According to general relativity, these objects are characterized solely by their mass MM and by their spin parameter aa_*. A fundamental limit for a black hole in general relativity is the Kerr bound a1|a_*| \le 1, but the accretion process can spin it up to a0.998a_* \approx 0.998. If a compact object is not a black hole, the Kerr bound does not hold and in this letter I provide some evidences suggesting that the accretion process could spin the body up to a>1a_* > 1. While this fact should be negligible for stellar-mass objects, some of the super-massive objects at the center of galaxies may actually be super-spinning bodies exceeding the Kerr bound. Such a possibility can be tested by gravitational wave detectors like LISA or by sub-millimeter very long baseline interferometry facilities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1101.1364,
  title  = {Spinning super-massive objects in galactic nuclei up to $a_* > 1$},
  author = {Cosimo Bambi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1101.1364},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

5 pages, 2 figures. v2: refereed version

R2 v1 2026-06-21T17:08:43.341Z