No Arabic abstract
We consider the escape probability of a photon emitted from the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) of a rapidly rotating black hole. As an isotropically emitting light source on a circular orbit reduces its orbital radius, the escape probability of a photon emitted from it decreases monotonically. The escape probability evaluated at the ISCO also decreases monotonically as the black hole spin increases. When the dimensionless Kerr parameter $a$ is at the Thorne limit $a=0.998$, the escape probability from the ISCO is $58.8%$. In the extremal case $a=1$, even if the orbital radius of the light source is arbitrarily close to the ISCO radius, which coincides with the horizon radius, the escape probability remains at $54.6%$. We also show that such photons that have escaped from the vicinity of the horizon reach infinity with sufficient energy to be potentially observed because Doppler blueshift due to relativistic beaming can overcome the gravitational redshift. Our findings indicate that signs of the near-horizon physics of a rapidly rotating black hole will be detectable on the edge of its shadow.
We compute the radiation emitted by a particle on the innermost stable circular orbit of a rapidly spinning black hole both (a) analytically, working to leading order in the deviation from extremality and (b) numerically, with a new high-precision Teukolsky code. We find excellent agreement between the two methods. We confirm previous estimates of the overall scaling of the power radiated, but show that there are also small oscillations all the way to extremality. Furthermore, we reveal an intricate mode-by-mode structure in the flux to infinity, with only certain modes having the dominant scaling. The scaling of each mode is controlled by its conformal weight, a quantity that arises naturally in the representation theory of the enhanced near-horizon symmetry group. We find relationships to previous work on particles orbiting in precisely extreme Kerr, including detailed agreement of quantities computed here with conformal field theory calculations performed in the context of the Kerr/CFT correspondence.
A rotating black hole causes the spin-axis of a nearby pulsar to precess due to geodetic and gravitomagnetic frame-dragging effects. The aim of our theoretical work here is to explore how this spin-precession can modify the rate at which pulses are received on earth. Towards this end, we obtain the complete evolution of the beam vectors of pulsars moving on equatorial circular orbits in the Kerr spacetime, relative to asymptotic fixed observers. We proceed to establish that such spin-precession effects can significantly modify observed pulse frequencies and, in specific, we find that the observed pulse frequency rises sharply as the orbit shrinks, potentially providing a new way to locate horizons of Kerr black holes, even if observed for a very short time period. We also discuss implications for detections of sub-millisecond pulsars, pulsar nulling, quasi-periodic oscillations, multiply-peaked pulsar Fourier profiles and how Kerr black holes can potentially be distinguished from naked singularities.
We investigate the spherical photon orbits in near-extremal Kerr spacetimes. We show that the spherical photon orbits with impact parameters in a finite range converge on the event horizon. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the Weyl curvature near the horizon does not generate the shear of a congruence of such light rays. Because of this property, a series of images produced by the light orbiting around a near-extremal Kerr black hole several times can be observable.
Magnetic fields in an accretion disk around the central black hole can modify the position of the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) radius and produces the difference for the classical Novikov-Thorne radius. We estimated the ISCO magnetic field strength on the base of polarimetric observations of the accretion disk radiation. This estimate can be obtained with taking into account the effect of Faraday rotation of the polarization plane at the length of the free path of photon between successive electron scattering events. In a result we presented the new method for real estimation of the ISCO radius in the accretion disk, i.e. in the nearest vicinity of a central black hole. Our estimations confirmed the V.P. Frolov, A.A. Shoom and C. Tzounis (2014) conclusion that magnetic field produces the effect in a result of which the innermost stable circular orbit becomes closer to the horizon of a black hole.