Wavefronts and Light Cones for Kerr Spacetimes

Francisco Frutos-Alfaro, Frank Grave, Thomas Müller, Daria Adis

Department of Physics, University of Costa Rica, San Pedro, Costa Rica.
Institute for Visualization und Interactive Systems, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany.
Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.

DOI: 10.4236/jmp.2012.312237                

Abstract

We investigate the light propagation by means of simulations of wavefronts and light cones for Kerr spacetimes. Simulations of this kind give us a new insight to better understand the light propagation in presence of massive rotating black holes. A relevant result is that wavefronts are backscattered with winding around the black hole. To generate these visualizations, an interactive computer program with a graphical user interface, called JWFront, was written in Java.

Keywords

General Relativity; Wavefronts; Lightcones; Simulations

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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