Rotating Disc around a Schwarzschild Black Hole

Abstract

A stationary and axisymmetric (in fact circular) metric is reviewed which describes the first-order perturbation of a Schwarzschild black-hole space-time due to a rotating finite thin disc encircling the hole symmetrically. The key Green functions of the problem (corresponding to an infinitesimally thin ring)—the one for the gravitational potential and the one for the dragging angular velocity—were already derived, in terms of infinite series, by Will in 1974, but we have now put them into closed forms using elliptic integrals. Such forms are more practical for numerical evaluation and for integration in problems involving extended sources. This last point mostly remains difficult, but we illustrate that it may be workable by using the simple case of a finite thin disc with constant Newtonian surface density.