Relativity In Strong Field Regime Research Articles

Slowly rotating topological neutron stars: universal relations and epicyclic frequencies

In the modern era of abundant X-ray detections and the increasing momentum of gravitational waves astronomy, tests of general relativity in strong field regime become increasingly feasible and their importance for probing gravity cannot be understated. To this end, we study the characteristics of slowly rotating topological neutron stars in the tensor-multi-scalar theories of gravity following the static study of this new type of compact objects by two of the authors. We explore the moment of inertia and verify that universal relations known from general relativity hold for this new class of compact objects. Furthermore, we study the properties of their innermost stable circular orbits and the epicyclic frequencies due to the latter’s hinted link to observational quantities such as quasi-periodic X-ray spectrum features.

Black hole shadow in the view of freely falling observers

First sketch of black hole from M87 galaxy was obtained by Event Horizon Telescope, recently. As appearance of black hole shadow reflects space-time geometry of black holes, observations of black hole shadow may be a promising way to test general relativity in strong field regime. In this paper, we focus on angular radius of spherical black hole shadow with respect to freely falling observers. In the framework of general relativity, aberration formulation and angular radius-gravitational redshift relation are presented. For the sake of intuitive, we consider parametrized Schwarzschild black hole and Schwarzschild-de Sitter black hole as representative examples. We find that the freely in-falling observers would observe finite size of shadow, when they go through inner horizon. For observers freely falling from the outer horizon of Schwarzschild-de Sitter black hole, we find that the angular radius of the shadows could increase even when the observers move farther from the black hole.