No Arabic abstract
Considerable attention has recently focused on gravity theories obtained by extending general relativity with additional scalar, vector, or tensor degrees of freedom. In this paper, we show that the black-hole solutions of these theories are essentially indistinguishable from those of general relativity. Thus, we conclude that a potential observational verification of the Kerr metric around an astrophysical black hole cannot, in and of itself, be used to distinguish between these theories. On the other hand, it remains true that detection of deviations from the Kerr metric will signify the need for a major change in our understanding of gravitational physics.
Recently, Hutsi et al.[arXiv:2105.09328] critiqued our work that reconsidered the mathematical description of cosmological black holes. In this short comment, we highlight some of the conceptual issues with this criticism in relation to the interpretation of the quasi-local Misner-Sharp mass, and the fact that our description of cosmological black holes does not impose any assumptions about matter accretion.
In this work, expanded solutions of force-free magnetospheres on general Kerr black holes are derived through a radial distance expansion method. From the regular conditions both at the horizon and at spatial infinity, two previously known asymptotical solutions (one of them is actually an exact solution) are identified as the only solutions that satisfy the same conditions at the two boundaries. Taking them as initial conditions at the boundaries, expanded solutions up to the first few orders are derived by solving the stream equation order by order. It is shown that our extension of the exact solution can (partially) cure the problems of the solution: it leads to magnetic domination and a mostly timelike current for restricted parameters.
In previous papers, explicit symplectic integrators were designed for nonrotating black holes, such as a Schwarzschild black hole. However, they fail to work in the Kerr spacetime because not all variables can be separable, or not all splitting parts have analytical solutions as explicit functions of proper time. To cope with this difficulty, we introduce a time transformation function to the Hamiltonian of Kerr geometry so as to obtain a time-transformed Hamiltonian consisting of five splitting parts, whose analytical solutions are explicit functions of the new coordinate time. The chosen time transformation function can cause time steps to be adaptive, but it is mainly used to implement the desired splitting of the time transformed Hamiltonian. In this manner, new explicit symplectic algorithms are easily available. Unlike Runge Kutta integrators, the newly proposed algorithms exhibit good long term behavior in the conservation of Hamiltonian quantities when appropriate fixed coordinate time steps are considered. They are better than same order implicit and explicit mixed symplectic algorithms and extended phase space explicit symplectic like methods in computational efficiency. The proposed idea on the construction of explicit symplectic integrators is suitable for not only the Kerr metric but also many other relativistic problems, such as a Kerr black hole immersed in a magnetic field, a Kerr Newman black hole with an external magnetic field, axially symmetric core shell systems, and five dimensional black ring metrics.
Very-long baseline interferometric observations have resolved structure on scales of only a few Schwarzschild radii around the supermassive black holes at the centers of our Galaxy and M87. In the near future, such observations are expected to image the shadows of these black holes together with a bright and narrow ring surrounding their shadows. For a Kerr black hole, the shape of this photon ring is nearly circular unless the black hole spins very rapidly. Whether or not, however, astrophysical black holes are truly described by the Kerr metric as encapsulated in the no-hair theorem still remains an untested assumption. For black holes that differ from Kerr black holes, photon rings have been shown numerically to be asymmetric for small to intermediate spins. In this paper, I calculate semi-analytic expressions of the shapes of photon rings around black holes described by a new Kerr-like metric which is valid for all spins. I show that photon rings in this spacetime are affected by two types of deviations from the Kerr metric which can cause the ring shape to be highly asymmetric. I argue that the ring asymmetry is a direct measure of a potential violation of the no-hair theorem and that both types of deviations can be detected independently if the mass and distance of the black hole are known. In addition, I obtain approximate expressions of the diameters, displacements, and asymmetries of photon rings around Kerr and Kerr-like black holes.
We study a critical limit in which asymptotically-AdS black holes develop maximal conical deficits and their horizons become non-compact. When applied to stationary rotating black holes this limit coincides with the ultraspinning limit and yields the Superentropic black holes whose entropy was derived recently and found to exceed the maximal possible bound imposed by the Reverse Isoperimetric Inequality. To gain more insight into this peculiar result, we study this limit in the context of accelerated AdS black holes that have unequal deficits along the polar axes, hence the maximal deficit need not appear on both poles simultaneously. Surprisingly, we find that in the presence of acceleration, the critical limit becomes smooth, and is obtained simply by taking various upper bounds in the parameter space that we elucidate. The Critical black holes thus obtained have many common features with Superentropic black holes, but are manifestly not superentropic. This raises a concern as to whether Superentropic black holes actually are superentropic. We argue that this may not be so and that the original conclusion is likely attributed to the degeneracy of the resulting first law.