Measuring black hole spin through gravitational lensing of pulsars

Author:

Amjad Ashoorioon, Mohammad Bagher Jahani Poshteh, Robert B. Mann

Keyword:

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc), Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO), High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph), High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)

journal:

date:

2023-08-31 16:00:00

Abstract

We put forward a new procedure for measuring the spin of a black hole with unprecedented accuracy based on gravitational lensing of millisecond pulsars. The deflection angle of light increases by increasing the rotation parameter. For primary and secondary images the angular positions are larger for rotating black holes by an amount of the order of microarcseconds. Also, the differential time delay for the case of a rotating black hole is larger than that for the non-rotating case and the difference could be as large as a few seconds. We show that this quantity could help us achieve an extremely precise measurement of the black hole spin, much more accurate than the current and near future achievable estimation of black hole spin through other methods.

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