Distinguishing Kerr naked singularities and black holes using the spin precession of a test gyro in strong gravitational fields

We study here the precession of the spin of a test gyroscope attached to a stationary observer in the Kerr spacetime, specifically, to distinguish a naked singularity (NS) from a black hole (BH). It was shown recently that for gyros attached to static observers, their precession frequency became arb...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review. D 2017-04, Vol.95 (8), Article 084024
Main Authors: Chakraborty, Chandrachur, Kocherlakota, Prashant, Patil, Mandar, Bhattacharyya, Sudip, Joshi, Pankaj S., Królak, Andrzej
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accretion disks
Angular momentum
Angular velocity
Black holes
Circular orbits
Divergence
Event horizon
Gravitational fields
Naked singularities
Observers
Precession
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Summary:We study here the precession of the spin of a test gyroscope attached to a stationary observer in the Kerr spacetime, specifically, to distinguish a naked singularity (NS) from a black hole (BH). It was shown recently that for gyros attached to static observers, their precession frequency became arbitrarily large in the limit of approach to the ergosurface. For gyros attached to stationary observers that move with nonzero angular velocity Ω, this divergence at the ergosurface can be avoided. Specifically, for such gyros, the precession frequencies diverge on the event horizon of a BH, but are finite and regular for a NS everywhere except at the singularity itself. Therefore a genuine detection of the event horizon becomes possible in this case. We also show that for a near-extremal NS (1
ISSN:2470-0010
2470-0029
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevD.95.084024