Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2402.07981

Relativistic aerodynamics of spinning black holes

Conor Dyson·Jaime Redondo-Yuste·Maarten van de Meent·Vitor Cardoso
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Astrophysical black holes do not exist in vacuum, and their motion is affected by the galactic environment. As a black hole moves it attracts stars and matter, creating a wake that, in turn, exerts an effective friction slowing down the black hole. This force is known as dynamical friction, and has significant consequences, ranging from the formation of supermassive black hole binaries to modifications in the phase of binary mergers. In this work we explore the motion of spinning black holes on a medium. We find that the classical drag along the velocity direction is modified and two novel forces appear: a rotational force, which in the context of fluid dynamics is dubbed the Magnus force, and a lift, orthogonal to the direction of motion. We develop a first-principles fully-relativistic treatment of these spin-induced aerodynamic forces in two types of environment: i) collisionless corpuscular matter and ii) a light scalar field, exploring the differences between both cases. In both cases we find that the total rotational force acts precisely in the opposite direction as compared to the classical set-up of a spinning ball moving through a fluid. Finally, we comment on the consequences of these new effects for astrophysics and gravitational wave observations.

Explore related subjects

gr-qcastro-ph.HEhep-th

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Conor Dyson, Jaime Redondo-Yuste, Maarten van de Meent, Vitor Cardoso. 2024-02-12. Relativistic aerodynamics of spinning black holes. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.109.104038

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Electrovacuum Black Hole Uniqueness

We prove the black hole uniqueness conjecture in the axially symmetric, stationary, electrovacuum setting, subject to the refined asymptotic analysis of the associated singular harmonic maps, which includes an analyticity hypothesis at the axes. More precisely, it is shown that any asymptotically flat solution of the Einstein--Maxwell equations in this class, with more than one black hole horizon component is either: Majumdar--Papapetrou, up to a duality rotation, in which case all logarithmic angle defects vanish, or every finite axis rod logarithmic angle defect is strictly negative and hence every interaction force is strictly attractive. The proof extends the singular harmonic map method used for vacuum Kerr uniqueness in [18].

gr-qc↗
arXiv2026

Constraining Modified Mass-to-Horizon Cosmology Through Primordial Inflationary Observables

We investigate slow-roll inflation in a modified cosmological framework inspired by a generalized mass-to-horizon relation (MHR), $M=\gamma {c^2 L^n}/{G}$, where $n$ is a real parameter and $\gamma$ a dimensional constant. Using Padmanabhan's emergence paradigm, we derive the modified Friedmann equations for a flat FRW universe and analyze the dynamics of a canonical scalar field (inflaton) under the slow-roll approximation. We study the resulting inflationary phenomenology for power-law and Starobinsky potentials. For power-law potentials, the MHR modification fails to reconcile these models with current CMB constraints on $r$ and $n_s$. In contrast, Starobinsky inflation exhibits significant sensitivity to deviations from $n=1$. A perturbative analysis ($n=1+\Delta$) yields corrections to inflationary observables. We observe that the scalar power-spectrum normalization, under a fixed-Starobinsky prescription, imposes the stringent constraint $0.960 \lesssim n \lesssim 1.040$ for $N=60$ efolds. This is considerably tighter than spectral-index bounds. Our results establish inflation, particularly Starobinsky-like models, as a sensitive probe of generalized horizon thermodynamics and departures from standard MHR scaling.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2026

Improving the Sensitivity of Gravitational Wave Detection with Weighted Conformal Prediction

In the last decade, kilometre-scale interferometric gravitational-wave detectors have observed hundreds of compact binary mergers, the majority of which are binary black holes. However, the data are noise-dominated, and multiple independent search algorithms (pipelines) are used to enhance sensitivity and improve robustness. Rather than the standard approach of selecting the most significant pipeline output, we combine the outputs from all pipelines using a conformal prediction-based framework to provide statistically rigorous confidence estimates for candidate events. While combining pipelines improves sensitivity and ranking robustness, it requires a principled statistical framework that remains valid as data properties evolve across observing runs. A key challenge is distribution shifts between simulated datasets used for training and calibration and the real, unlabelled, observations used for testing, which can invalidate coverage guarantees and bias confidence estimates. In this work, we address this challenge by incorporating likelihood-ratio reweighting into our conformal prediction framework to account for covariate shift. Using mock datasets containing simulated signals, we demonstrate that weighted conformal prediction restores well-calibrated coverage under covariate shift and increases the confidence of events near the detection threshold, recovering true signals that would otherwise be missed.

gr-qc↗