- Letter
Exact analytic photon escape cones and silhouettes for extremal Kerr black holes
Phys. Rev. D 111, L021501 – Published 6 January, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.111.L021501
Abstract
Herein we exhibit exact, analytic, fully explicit, photon escape cones and the related silhouettes (“shadows”) at arbitrary distance from an extremal () Kerr black hole. In contrast to the situation for nonextremal () Kerr, where one typically has to resort to numerical, and/or graphics based, and/or perturbative investigations, the situation for extremal Kerr is amenable to direct analytic and fully explicit investigation. Interest in these results is twofold: In view of the technical complexity of Kerr spacetime, any fully explicit analytic result (even if only for the special case of extremality) is a significant aid to physical insight. Furthermore a significant fraction of observationally accessible galactic black holes are high spin, relatively close to extremal, objects () so the extremal case is a good analytically tractable zeroth order approximation for such objects.