Gravitational Shock Waves for Schwarzschild and Kerr Black Holes

The fundamental role played by black holes in our study of microquasars, gamma ray bursts, and the outflows from active galactic nuclei requires an appreciation for, and at times some in-depth analysis of, curved spacetime. We highlight misconceptions surrounding the notion of coordinate transformation in general relativity as applied to metrics for rotating black holes that are beginning to increasingly appear in the literature. We emphasize that there is no coordinate trans...

I generalize the Dray-'t Hooft gravitational shockwave to the Kerr-AdS background.

In this paper we analyze the spacetime geometry due to a Schwarzschild object having accelerated motion. In the beginning we investigated the gravitational field due to a uniformly moving Schwarzschild object and obtained the spacetime line element for such an object. After analyzing the necessary boundary conditions the obtained line element is found to be consistent. Next we extended our work to a uniformly accelerated Schwarzschild object. In that case we obtained the spac...

The complete solution of Einstein's gravitational equations with a vacuum-vacuum Kerr-Schild pencil of metrics $g_{ab}+V l_al_b$ is obtained. Our result generalizes the solution of the Kerr-Schild problem with a flat metric $g_{ab}$ (represented by the Kerr theorem) to the case when $g_{ab}$ is the metric of a curved space-time.

The harmonic metric for a moving Kerr black hole is presented in the second post-Minkowskian approximation. It is further demonstrated that the obtained metric is consistent with the Li\'{e}nard-Wiechert gravitational potential for a moving and spinning source with an arbitrary constant velocity. Based on the metric, we also give the post-Newtonian equations of motion for photon and massive test particle in the time-dependent gravitational field.

The Minkowski background intrinsic to the Kerr-Schild version of the Kerr metric provides a definition of a boosted spinning black hole. There are two Kerr-Schild versions corresponding to ingoing or outgoing principal null directions. The two corresponding Minkowski backgrounds and their associated boosts differ drastically. This has an important implication for the gravitational memory effect. A prior analysis of the transition of a non-spinning Schwarzschild black hole to ...

The problem of deriving a shock-wave geometry with cosmological constant by boosting a Schwarzschild-de Sitter (or anti-de Sitter) black hole is re-examined. Unlike previous work in the literature, we deal with the exact Schwarzschild-de Sitter (or anti-de Sitter) metric. By virtue of peculiar cancellations in this exact calculation, where the metric does not depend linearly on the mass parameter, we find a singularity of distributional nature on a null hypersurface, which co...

Although the Kerr solution is common to many gravity theories, its perturbations are different in different theories. Hence, perturbed Kerr black holes can probe deviations from General Relativity.

We prove that the essential smoothness of the gravitational metric at shock waves in GR, a PDE regularity issue for weak solutions of the Einstein equations, is determined by a geometrical condition which we introduce and name the {\it Riemann-flat condition}. The Riemann-flat condition determines whether or not the essential smoothness of the gravitational metric is two full derivatives more regular than the Riemann curvature tensor. This provides a geometric framework for t...

This work is devoted to the study of some important questions in general relativity. They include topics related to astrophysical shock waves, impulsive signals, gravitational memory effect, black hole geometries and integrable systems connected with them.