Dependence of General Relativistic Accretion on Black Hole Spin

Abstract

We propose a novel approach to the investigation of how black hole spin influences the behavior of astrophysical accretion. We examine the terminal behavior of general relativistic, multi-transonic, hydrodynamic advective accretion in the Kerr metric, by analyzing various dynamical as well as thermodynamic properties of accreting matter extremely close to the event horizon, as a function of Kerr parameter $a$. The examination of the transonic properties of such flows can be useful in self-consistently discriminating between prograde and retrograde relativistic accretion, and in studying the spectral signatures of black hole rotation.