Abstract
According to the no-hair theorem, static black holes are described by a Schwarzschild spacetime provided there are no other sources of the gravitational field. This requirement, however, is in astrophysical realistic scenarios often violated, e.g., if the black hole is part of a binary system or if it is surrounded by an accretion disk. In these cases, the black hole is distorted due to tidal forces. Nonetheless, the subsequent formulation of the no-hair theorem holds: The contribution of the distorted black hole to the multipole moments that describe the gravitational field close to infinity and, thus, all sources is that of a Schwarzschild black hole. It still has no hair. This implies that there is no multipole moment induced in the black hole and that its second Love numbers, which measure some aspects of the distortion, vanish as was already shown in approximations to general relativity. But here we prove this property for astrophysical relevant black holes in full general relativity.
- Received 27 August 2014
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.151102
© 2015 American Physical Society
Viewpoint
The Simplicity of Black Holes
Published 15 April 2015
The no-hair theorem was originally formulated to describe isolated black holes, but an extended version now describes the more realistic case of a black hole distorted by nearby matter.
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