Relativistic sonic geometry for isothermal accretion in the Schwarzschild metric

TL;DR

This paper investigates the emergent acoustic geometry in relativistic isothermal accretion onto Schwarzschild black holes, analyzing how perturbations reveal horizons and surface gravity, with results depending on accretion geometry.

Contribution

It introduces a method to derive the acoustic metric from relativistic accretion flows and explores the dependence on geometric configurations.

Findings

Acoustic horizons correspond to transonic surfaces in accretion flows.

Surface gravity can be computed from background flow variables.

Salient features of the acoustic geometry are geometry-dependent.

Abstract

In this work, we perform linear perturbation on general relativistic isothermal accretion onto a non-rotating astrophysical black hole to study the salient features of the corresponding emergent acoustic metric. For spherically symmetric accretion as well as for the axially symmetric matter flow for three different geometric configuration of matter, we perturb the velocity potential, the mass accretion rate, and the integral solution of the time independent part of the general relativistic Euler equation to obtain such acoustic geometry. We provide the procedure to locate the acoustic horizon and identify such horizon with the transonic surfaces of the accreting matter through the construction of the corresponding causal structures. We then discuss how one can compute the value of the acoustic surface gravity in terms of the accretion variable corresponding to the background flow solutions - i.e., stationary integral transonic accretion solutions for different matter geometries. We show that the salient features of the acoustic geometry is independent of the physical variable we perturb, but sensitively depends on the geometric configuration of the black hole accretion disc.