A periodic table for black hole orbits

By J. Levin, Gabe Perez-Giz. 2008

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding the dynamics around rotating black holes is imperative to the success of future gravitational wave observatories. Although integrable in principle, test-particle orbits in the Kerr spacetime can also be elaborate, and while they have been studied extensively, classifying their general properties has been a challenge. This is the first in a series of papers that adopts a dynamical systems approach to the study of Kerr orbits, beginning with equatorial orbits. We define a taxonomy of orbits that hinges on a correspondence between periodic orbits and rational numbers. The taxonomy defines the entire dynamics, including aperiodic motion, since every orbit is in or near the periodic set. A remarkable implication of this periodic orbit taxonomy is that the simple precessing ellipse familiar from planetary orbits is not allowed in the strong-field regime. Instead, eccentric orbits trace out precessions of multileaf clovers in the final stages of inspiral. Furthermore, for any black hole, there is some point in the strong-field regime past which zoom-whirl behavior becomes unavoidable. Finally, we sketch the potential application of the taxonomy to problems of astrophysical interest, in particular its utility for computationally intensive gravitational wave calculations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4dff5f7c6f653982e3cc5db72282714bdf7b044b

Citations in the corpus

• Gravitational waves from scattering of stellar-mass black holes in galactic nuclei (2008, unknown): “Such encounters have been studied in the geodesic approximation appropriate for extreme mass ratios (Gair, Kennefick & Larson 2005, 2006; Pretorius & Khurana 2007; Levin & Perez-Giz 2008) and using full numerical simulation for equal masses (Hinder et al. 2008b).”