Square Peg in a Circular Hole: Choosing the Right Ansatz for Isolated Black Holes in Generic Gravitational Theories

Abstract

The metric of a spacetime can be greatly simplified if the spacetime is circular. We prove that in generic effective theories of gravity, the spacetime of a stationary, axisymmetric and asymptotically flat solution must be circular if the solution can be obtained perturbatively from a solution in the general relativity limit. This result applies to a broad class of gravitational theories that include arbitrary scalars and vectors in their light sector, so long as their nonstandard kinetic terms and nonmininal couplings to gravity are treated perturbatively.