The Caustic Structure of the Kerr Metric and its Possible Contribution to AGN X-ray Variability

Details The Caustic Structure of the Kerr Metric and its Possible Contribution to AGN X-ray Variability The Caustic Structure of the Kerr Metric and its Possible Contribution to AGN X-ray Variability

Dec 1992

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1992aas...181.3505r&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, 181st AAS Meeting, #35.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 24, p.1173

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Scientific paper

An investigation of the caustic structure of the Kerr metric is presented. The caustics are the loci of infinite source magnification resulting from the gravitational lensing produced by a rotating black hole. The results may be relevant to the variability of active galactic nuclei (AGN), which are commonly presumed to contain massive (spinning) black holes in their centers, and would apply primarily to variability in the X-ray emission, which is produced at relatively small radii from the black hole where the effects are greatest. Using these results a number of sample light curves are produced for point sources moving on geodesic orbits about the black hole. It is found that sources passing in the vicinity of a caustic can brighten dramatically (by well over a factor of 1000 for sufficiently small sources) due to lensing and hence could produce visible flashes in an AGN's output, depending on the geometry of the emitting matter. This gravitational magnification is most important in disk and especially jet geometries, where there is a concentration of emitting material in or near the caustics, for suitably oriented observers.

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