SageMath notebooks associated to the Black Hole Lectures (https://luth.obspm.fr/~luthier/gourgoulhon/bh16)
Spherical null geodesics in Kerr spacetime
Computation with kerrgeodesic_gw
This Jupyter/SageMath notebook is relative to the lectures Geometry and physics of black holes.
It requires SageMath (version 8.2), with the package kerrgeodesic_gw (version 0.3.2). To install the latter, simply run
in a terminal.
First, we set up the notebook to use LaTeX-formatted display:
and we ask for CPU demanding computations to be performed in parallel on 8 processes:
A Kerr black bole is entirely defined by two parameters , where is the black hole mass and is the black hole angular momentum divided by . In this notebook, we shall set and we denote the angular momentum parameter by the symbolic variable a, using a0 for a specific numerical value:
The spacetime object is created as an instance of the class KerrBH:
The Boyer-Lindquist coordinate of the event horizon:
The method boyer_lindquist_coordinates() returns the chart of Boyer-Lindquist coordinates BL and allows the user to instanciate the Python variables (t, r, th, ph) to the coordinates :
The metric tensor is naturally returned by the method metric():
Spherical photon orbits
Functions and for spherical photon orbits:
-turning points:
Spherical photon orbit at ()
A geodesic is constructed by providing the range of the affine parameter , the initial point and either
(i) the Boyer-Lindquist components of the initial 4-momentum vector ,
(ii) the four integral of motions
or (iii) some of the components of along with with some integrals of motion.
The numerical integration of the geodesic equation is performed via integrate(), by providing the integration step :
Prograde spherical photon orbit at
Spherical photon orbit at
Retrograde spherical photon orbit at
A polar spherical photon orbit
Inner spherical orbits
To plot the inner orbits, and in particular orbits with , we use a map from Kerr spacetime to the Euclidean space based on the radial coordinate instead of the Boyer-Lindquist .
Marginally stable spherical photon orbit
Since all orbits with (such as the marginally stable spherical orbit) have , we set E = -1 and L = -L:
Plot with respect to coordinate:
Stable inner spherical photon orbit at
Plot in (Cartesian) Boyer-Lindquist coordinates:
Plot with respect to coordinate: