Innermost stable circular orbits of a Kerr-like Metric with Quadrupole

Abstract

The innermost stable circular orbit equation of a test particle is obtained for an approximate Kerr-like spacetime with quadrupole moment. We derived the effective potential for the radial coordinate by the Euler-Lagrange method. This equation can be employed to measure the mass quadrupole by observational means, because from this equation a quadratic polynomial for the quadrupole moment can be found. As expected, the limiting cases of this equation are found to be the known cases of Kerr and Schwarzschild.