2015/03/11 by Norman Gürlebeck · 214 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Accretion (finance) #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics #Binary black hole #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Black hole (networking) #Charged black hole #Classical mechanics #Extremal black hole #General relativity #Gravitation #Gravitational collapse #Gravitational wave #Multipole expansion #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Quantum mechanics #Rotating black hole #Schwarzschild metric #Schwarzschild radius #Theoretical physics #White hole #astro-ph.HE #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.114.151102
published in Physical Review Letters 114(15), 151102 (American Physical Society) · 5 pages, to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett
arxiv created 2015/03/11 · openalex publication_date 2015/04/15 · arxiv updated 2015/06/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
According to the no-hair theorem, static black holes are described by a Schwarzschild spacetime provided there are no other sources of the gravitational field. This requirement, however, is in astrophysical realistic scenarios often violated, e.g., if the black hole is part of a binary system or if it is surrounded by an accretion disk. In these cases, the black hole is distorted due to tidal forces. Nonetheless, the subsequent formulation of the no-hair theorem holds: The contribution of the distorted black hole to the multipole moments that describe the gravitational field close to infinity and, thus, all sources is that of a Schwarzschild black hole. It still has no hair. This implies that there is no multipole moment induced in the black hole and that its second Love numbers, which measure some aspects of the distortion, vanish as was already shown in approximations to general relativity. But here we prove this property for astrophysical relevant black holes in full general relativity.