English

Inspirals into a charged black hole

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2018-06-06 v2

Abstract

We model the quasicircular inspiral of a compact object into a more massive charged black hole. Extreme and intermediate mass-ratio inspirals are considered through a small mass-ratio approximation. Reissner-Nordstro¨\ddot{\text{o}}m spacetime is used to describe the charged black hole. The effect of radiation reaction on the smaller body is quantified through calculation of electromagnetic and gravitational energy fluxes via solution of Einstein's and Maxwell's equations. Inspiral trajectories are determined by matching the orbital energy decay rate to the rate of radiative energy dissipation. We observe that inspirals into a charged black hole evolve more rapidly than comparable inspirals into a neutral black hole. Through analysis of a variety of inspiral configurations, we conclude that electric charge is an important effect concerning gravitational wave observations when the charge exceeds the threshold Q/M0.071ϵ|Q|/M \gtrsim 0.071 \sqrt{\epsilon}, where ϵ\epsilon is the mass ratio.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.00836,
  title  = {Inspirals into a charged black hole},
  author = {Ruomin Zhu and Thomas Osburn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.00836},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Edited to reflect the published version 17 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T00:09:14.366Z