A New Window into Black Holes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formalism to compute gravitational multipole moments of black holes and microstate geometries, revealing new parameters and ratios that enhance understanding of black hole physics.

Contribution

It presents two methods for calculating dimensionless multipole ratios, enabling the discovery of previously unknown Kerr black hole parameters.

Findings

Multipole ratios for supersymmetric black holes match spectacularly.

New parameters of Kerr black holes are computed for the first time.

Methods allow calculation of infinite unknown parameters of Kerr black holes.

Abstract

We develop a formalism to compute the gravitational multipole moments and ratios of moments of non-extremal and of supersymmetric black holes in four dimensions, as well as of horizonless microstate geometries of the latter. For supersymmetric and for Kerr black holes many of these multipole moments vanish, and their dimensionless ratios are ill-defined. We present two methods to compute these dimensionless ratios, which for certain supersymmetric black holes agree spectacularly. We also compute these dimensionless ratios for the Kerr solution. Our methods allow us to calculate an infinite number of hitherto unknown parameters of Kerr black holes, giving us a new window into their physics.