Tidal Forces in Kerr-AdS and Grey Galaxies

TL;DR

This paper investigates tidal forces in Kerr-AdS spacetime to assess the interaction between a black hole and surrounding thermal gas in Grey Galaxy solutions, supporting their weak coupling nature.

Contribution

It introduces a method to compute tidal forces along geodesics in Kerr-AdS and applies it to Grey Galaxy models, showing tidal effects are negligible.

Findings

Tidal forces are small even for large black hole masses.

Gas in Grey Galaxies interacts weakly with the black hole.

Supports the Grey Galaxy conjecture as a weakly interacting system.

Abstract

In a recent paper [arXiv:2305.08922], it has been proposed that the endpoint of the Kerr-AdS superradiant instability is a Grey Galaxy. The conjectured solutions are supposed to be made up of a black hole with critical angular velocity in the centre of AdS, surrounded by a large flat disk of thermal bulk gas that revolves around the black hole. In the analysis of the proposed solutions so far, gravitational effects due to the black hole on the thermal gas have been neglected. A way to estimate these effects is via computing tidal forces. With this motivation, we study tidal forces on objects moving in the Kerr-AdS spacetime. To do so, we construct a parallel-transported orthonormal frame along an arbitrary timelike or null geodesic. We then specialise to the class of fast rotating geodesics lying in the equatorial plane, and estimate tidal forces on the gas in the Grey Galaxies, modelling it as a collection of particles moving on timelike geodesics. We show that the tidal forces are small (and remain small even in the large mass limit), thereby providing additional support to the idea that the gas is weakly interacting with the black hole.