206 research outputs found
Note on the effect of a massive accretion disk in the measurements of black hole spins
The spin measurement of black holes has important implications in physics and
astrophysics. Regardless of the specific technique to estimate the black hole
spin, all the current approaches assume that the space-time geometry around the
compact object is exactly described by the Kerr solution. This is clearly an
approximation, because the Kerr metric is a stationary solution of the vacuum
Einstein equations. In this paper, we estimate the effect of a massive
accretion disk in the measurement of the black hole spin with a simple
analytical model. For typical accretion disks, the mass of the disk is
completely negligible, even for future more accurate measurements. However, for
systems with very massive disks the effect may not be ignored.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. v2: corrected a few typo
- …