Strong-field tidal distortions of rotating black holes: Formalism and results for circular, equatorial orbits
Name
PhysRevD.90.124039.pdf
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1.28 MB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
e73a2b63ab94d6bf72e36221837d96fe
Author(s)
O'Sullivan, Stephen Gerard
Hughes, Scott A
Date Issued
December 2014
Journal
Physical Review D
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
O'Sullivan, Stephen, and Scott A. Hughes. "Strong-field tidal distortions of rotating black holes: Formalism and results for circular, equatorial orbits." Phys. Rev. D 90, 124039 (December 2014). © 2014 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Tidal coupling between members of a compact binary system can have an interesting and important influence on that binary’s dynamical inspiral. Tidal coupling also distorts the binary’s members, changing them (at lowest order) from spheres to ellipsoids. At least in the limit of fluid bodies and Newtonian gravity, there are simple connections between the geometry of the distorted ellipsoid and the impact of tides on the orbit’s evolution. In this paper, we develop tools for investigating tidal distortions of rapidly rotating black holes using techniques that are good for strong-field, fast-motion binary orbits. We use black hole perturbation theory, so our results assume extreme mass ratios. We develop tools to compute the distortion to a black hole’s curvature for any spin parameter, and for tidal fields arising from any bound orbit, in the frequency domain. We also develop tools to visualize the horizon’s distortion for black hole spin a/M ≤ √3/2 (leaving the more complicated a/M > √3/2 case to a future analysis). We then study how a Kerr black hole’s event horizon is distorted by a small body in a circular, equatorial orbit. We find that the connection between the geometry of tidal distortion and the orbit’s evolution is not as simple as in the Newtonian limit.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.124039
