Geometry Of Black Hole Spacetimes Research Articles

Curvatures, photon spheres, and black hole shadows

In a recent work PRD 106, L021501 (2022), a new geometric approach is proposed to obtain the photon sphere (circular photon orbit) and the black hole shadow radius. In this approach, photon spheres and the black hole shadow radius are determined using geodesic curvature and Gaussian curvature in the optical geometry of black hole spacetimes. However, the calculations in PRD 106, L021501 (2022) only restricted to a subclass of static and spherically symmetric black holes with spacetime metric $g_{tt} \cdot g_{rr}=-1$, $g_{\theta\theta}=r^{2}$ and $g_{\phi\phi}=r^{2}\sin^{2}\theta$. In this work, we extend this approach to more general spherically symmetric black holes (with spacetime metric $ds^{2}=g_{tt}dt^{2}+g_{rr}dr^{2}+g_{\theta\theta}d\theta^{2}+g_{\phi\phi}d\phi^{2}$). Furthermore, it can be proved that our results from the geometric approach are completely equivalent to those from conventional approach based on effective potentials of test particles.

The shadows and observational appearance of a noncommutative black hole surrounded by various profiles of accretions

The accretion around the black hole plays a pivotal role in the theoretical analysis of black hole shadow, and of the black hole observation in particular. We mainly study the shadow and observation characteristics of noncommutative Schwarzschild black holes wrapped by three accretion models, and then explore the influence of noncommutative parameters on the observation appearance and spacetime geometry of black holes. When the black hole is surrounded by an optically and geometrically thin accretion disk, it shows that the direct emissions always dominate the total observed intensity, while the lensing ring superimposed upon the direct emission produces a thin ring, which improves the observation intensity of the black hole image. However, the photon rings makes negligible contributions to the total observed brightness due to its exponential narrowness, although the photon ring intersects the thin plane more than three times to pick up larger intensity. More importantly, when the noncommutative parameters changed, the corresponding regions and observation intensities of photon ring, lensing ring and direct emission all change correspondingly. For optical thin spherically symmetric accretion, we consider the static and infalling matters, respectively. We find that the observation intensity of the two spherical accretion models increase with the increase of noncommutative parameters. In addition, due to the Doppler effect of the infalling movement, the shadow image of infalling accretion is darker than that of static accretion. In a word, the different accretion models and noncommutative parameters will lead to different shadow images and optical appearances of noncommutative Schwarzschild black holes.

Light ring and the appearance of matter accreted by black holes

The geometry of black hole spacetimes can be probed with exquisite precision in the gravitational-wave window, and possibly also in the optical regime. We study the accretion of bright spots -- objects which emit strongly in the optical or in gravitational waves -- by non-spinning black holes. The emission as the object falls down the hole is dominated by photons or gravitons orbiting the light ring, causing the total luminosity to decrease exponentially as ${\cal L}_o\sim e^{-t/(3\sqrt{3}\,M)}$. Late-time radiation is blueshifted, due to its having been emitted during the infall, trapped at the light ring and subsequently re-emitted. These universal properties are a clear signature of the existence of light rings in the spacetime, and not particularly sensitive to near horizon details.

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.

The Future of Black Hole Astrophysics in the LIGO-VIRGO-LPF Era

There is a resurgence of interest in black holes sparked by the LIGO-VIRGO detection of stellar black hole mergers and recent astronomical investigations of jets and accretion disks which probe the spacetime geometry of black holes with masses ranging from a few times the mass of the sun to tens of billions of solar masses. Many of these black holes appear to be spinning rapidly. Some new approaches are described to studying how accreting black holes function as cosmic machines paying special attention to observations of AGN jets, especially with VLBI and γ-ray telescopes. It is assumed that these jets are powered by the electromagnetic extraction of the spin energy of their associated black holes, which are described by the Kerr metric, and that they become simpler and more electromagnetically dominated as the event horizon is approached. The major uncertainty in these models is in describing acceleration and transport of relativistic electrons and positrons and simple phenomenological prescriptions are proposed. The application of these ideas to M87 and 3C279 is outlined and the prospects for learning more, especially from the Event Horizon Telescope and the Cerenkov Telescope Array, are discussed. The main benefit of a better understanding of black hole astrophysics to the LISA mission should be a firmer understanding of the source demographics.

Thermodynamics of charged Lovelock: AdS black holes

We investigate the thermodynamic behavior of maximally symmetric charged, asymptotically AdS black hole solutions of Lovelock gravity. We explore the thermodynamic stability of such solutions by the ordinary method of calculating the specific heat of the black holes and investigating its divergences which signal second-order phase transitions between black hole states. We then utilize the methods of thermodynamic geometry of black hole spacetimes in order to explain the origin of these points of divergence. We calculate the curvature scalar corresponding to a Legendre-invariant thermodynamic metric of these spacetimes and find that the divergences in the black hole specific heat correspond to singularities in the thermodynamic phase space. We also calculate the area spectrum for large black holes in the model by applying the Bohr–Sommerfeld quantization to the adiabatic invariant calculated for the spacetime.

Transient Resonances in the Inspirals of Point Particles into Black Holes

We show that transient resonances occur in the two-body problem in general relativity for spinning black holes in close proximity to one another when one black hole is much more massive than the other. These resonances occur when the ratio of polar and radial orbital frequencies, which is slowly evolving under the influence of gravitational radiation reaction, passes through a low order rational number. At such points, the adiabatic approximation to the orbital evolution breaks down, and there is a brief but order unity correction to the inspiral rate. The resonances cause a perturbation to orbital phase of order a few tens of cycles for mass ratios ∼10(-6), make orbits more sensitive to changes in initial data (though not quite chaotic), and are genuine nonperturbative effects that are not seen at any order in a standard post-Newtonian expansion. Our results apply to an important potential source of gravitational waves, the gradual inspiral of white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes into much more massive black holes. Resonances' effects will increase the computational challenge of accurately modeling these sources.