Marginally stable circular orbit of a test body in spherically symmetric and static spacetimes

Abstract

We study a marginally stable circular orbit (MSCO) such as the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) of a timelike geodesic in any spherically symmetric and static spacetime. It turns out that the metric components are separable from the constants of motion along geodesics. We show also that a metric component $g_{rr}$ with a radial coordinate $r$ does not affect MSCOs. This suggests that, as a test of gravity, any ISCO measurement may be put into the same category as gravitational redshift experiments. MSCOs for exact solutions to the Einstein's equation are also mentioned.