Transition from adiabatic inspiral to geodesic plunge for a compact object around a massive Kerr black hole: Generic orbits

The inspiral of a stellar mass compact object falling into a massive Kerr black hole can be broken into three different regimes: An adiabatic inspiral phase, where the inspiral time scale is much larger than the orbital period; a late-time radial infall, which can be approximated as a plunging geode...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Sundararajan, Pranesh A.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Physical Society 2010
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/51333
Description
Summary:The inspiral of a stellar mass compact object falling into a massive Kerr black hole can be broken into three different regimes: An adiabatic inspiral phase, where the inspiral time scale is much larger than the orbital period; a late-time radial infall, which can be approximated as a plunging geodesic; and a regime where the body transitions from the inspiral to plunge. In earlier work, Ori and Thorne have outlined a method to compute the trajectory during this transition for a compact object in a circular, equatorial orbit. We generalize this technique to include inclination and eccentricity.