Painleve-Gullstrand form of the Lense-Thirring spacetime

Abstract

The standard Lense-Thirring metric is a century-old slow-rotation large-distance approximation to the gravitational field outside a rotating massive body, depending only on the total mass and angular momentum of the source. Although it is not an exact solution to the vacuum Einstein equations, asymptotically the Lense-Thirring metric approaches the Kerr metric at large distances. Herein we shall discuss a specific variant of the standard Lense-Thirring metric, carefully chosen for simplicity, clarity, and various forms of "improved" behaviour, (to be more carefully defined in the body of the article). In particular we shall construct an explicit unit-lapse Painleve-Gullstrand variant of the Lense-Thirring spacetime, that has flat spatial slices, a very simple and physically intuitive tetrad, and extremely simple curvature tensors. We shall verify that this variant of the Lense-Thirring spacetime is Petrov type I, (so it is not algebraically special), but nevertheless possesses some very straightforward timelike geodesics, (the "rain" geodesics). We shall also discuss on-axis and equatorial geodesics, ISCOs and circular photon orbits. Finally, we wrap up by discussing some astrophysically relevant estimates, and analyze what happens if we extrapolate down to small values of r.