Gravitational Lensing in the Kerr Spacetime: An Analytic Approach for Light and High-Frequency Gravitational Waves

TL;DR

This paper derives exact analytic solutions for gravitational lensing of light and high-frequency gravitational waves in Kerr spacetime, enabling precise predictions of observational phenomena around rotating black holes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analytic framework for gravitational lensing in Kerr spacetime, including exact solutions for light and gravitational waves, and formulates an exact lens equation.

Findings

Derived radius coordinates of photon orbits as functions of celestial longitude

Classified motion types using latitude-longitude coordinates

Formulated an exact lens equation and calculated redshift and travel time

Abstract

The Kerr spacetime is one of the most widely known solutions to Einstein's vacuum field equations and is commonly used to describe a black hole with mass $m$ and spin $a$. Astrophysical observations in the electromagnetic spectrum as well as detected gravitational wave signals indicate that it can be used to describe the spacetime around candidates for rotating black holes. While the geodesic structure of the Kerr spacetime is already well known for decades, using exact analytic solutions to the equations of motion for applications to astrophysical problems has only attracted attention relatively recently. Here, these applications mainly focus on predicting observations for the shadow, the photon rings, and characteristic structures in the accretion disk. Using the exact analytic solutions to investigate exact gravitational lensing of light and gravitational waves emitted by sources outside the accretion disk has only received limited attention so far. Therefore, the focus of this paper will be to address this question. For this purpose we assume that we have a standard observer in the domain of outer communication. We introduce a local orthonormal tetrad to relate the constants of motion of light rays and high-frequency gravitational waves detected by the observer to latitude-longitude coordinates on the observer's celestial sphere. In this parameterisation we derive the radius coordinates of the photon orbits and their latitudinal projections onto the observer's celestial sphere as functions of the celestial longitude. We use the latitude-longitude coordinates to classify the different types of motion, and solve the equations of motion analytically using elementary and Jacobi's elliptic functions as well as Legendre's elliptic integrals. We use the analytic solutions to write down an exact lens equation, and to calculate the redshift and the travel time.