The properties of an anisotropic fluid outside a star or a black hole embedded in an expanding universe are investigated. One finds that, in Painleve-Gullstrand coordinates, the heat flux of the cosmological fluid vanishes, in spite of the nonzero value of a non-diagonal component of the stress tensor. The pressures and energy density of the fluid are regular at $r = 2m$, divergent at $r = 0$ and change sign at certain values of their arguments.
Cosmology is most typically analyzed using standard co-moving coordinates, in which the galaxies are (on average, up to presumably small peculiar velocities) "at rest", while "space" is expanding. But this is merely a specific coordinate choice; and it is important to realise that for certain purposes other, (sometimes radically different) coordinate choices might also prove useful and informative, but without changing the underlying physics. Specifically, herein we shall consider the k=0 spatially flat FLRW cosmology but in Painleve-Gullstrand coordinates -- these coordinates are very explici…
The group of rigid motions is considered to guide the search for a natural system of space-time coordinates in General Relativity. This search leads us to a natural extension of the space-times that support Painlevé--Gullstrand synchronization. As an interesting example, here we describe a system of rigid coordinates for the cross mode of gravitational linear plane waves.
A nonstatic Schwarzschild black hole interior solution in Painleve-Gullstrand coordinates is proposed in this paper, by means of a coordinate transformation that changes the spatial coordinate but the timelike one is preserved. The timelike and null geodesic equations are obtained exactly, taking advantage that the spatial z-coordinate is cyclic.
The Painleve-Gullstrand coordinates provide a convenient framework for presenting the Schwarzschild geometry because of their flat constant-time hypersurfaces, and the fact that they are free of coordinate singularities outside r=0. Generalizations of Painleve-Gullstrand coordinates suitable for the Kerr geometry have been presented by Doran and Natario. These coordinate systems feature a time coordinate identical to the proper time of zero-angular-momentum observers that are dropped from infinity. Here, the methods of Doran and Natario are extended to the five-dimensional rotating black hole …
A Painlevé-Gullstrand synchronization is a slicing of the space-time by a family of flat spacelike 3-surfaces. For spherically symmetric space-times, we show that a Painlevé-Gullstrand synchronization only exists in the region where $(dr)^2 \leq 1$, $r$ being the curvature radius of the isometry group orbits ($2$-spheres). This condition says that the Misner-Sharp gravitational energy of these 2-spheres is not negative and has an intrinsic meaning in terms of the norm of the mean extrinsic curvature vector. It also provides an algebraic inequality involving the Weyl curvature scalar and the Ri…
We construct an exact solution for the spherical gravitational collapse in a single coordinate patch. To describe the dynamics of collapse, we use a generalized form of the Painlevé-Gullstrand coordinates in the Schwarzschild spacetime. The time coordinate of the form is the proper time of a free-falling observer so that we can describe the collapsing star not only outside but also inside the event horizon in a single coordinate patch. We show the both solutions corresponding to the gravitational collapse from infinity and from a finite radius.
We investigate Choptuik scaling in the spherically symmetric collapse of a massless scalar field in higher dimensions using Painleve-Gullstrand (P-G) coordinates. Our analysis confirms the presence in higher dimensions of the cusps in the periodic scaling relationship recently observed in four dimensional collapse. In addition, we address the issue of the asymptotic behaviour of the critical exponent as the number of spacetime dimensions gets large. Our results are consistent with earlier work suggesting that the critical exponent monotonically approaches 1/2 in this limit.
We discuss the tension between the possible existence of Painleve-Gullstrand coordinate systems versus the explicit geometrical features of the Kerr spacetime; a subject of interest to Professor Thanu Padmanabhan in the weeks immediately preceding his unexpected death. We shall carefully distinguish strong and weak Painleve-Gullstrand coordinate systems, and conformal variants thereof, cataloguing what we know can and cannot be done -- sometimes we can make explicit global statements, sometimes we must resort to implicit local statements. For the Kerr spacetime the best that seems to be achiev…
We construct a coordinate system for the Kerr solution, based on the zero angular momentum observers dropped from infinity, which generalizes the Painleve-Gullstrand coordinate system for the Schwarzschild solution. The Kerr metric can then be interpreted as describing space flowing on a (curved) Riemannian 3-manifold. The stationary limit arises as the set of points on this manifold where the speed of the flow equals the speed of light, and the horizons as the set of points where the radial speed equals the speed of light. A deeper analysis of what is meant by the flow of space reveals that t…
Recently, the current authors have formulated and extensively explored a rather novel Painleve-Gullstrand variant of the slow-rotation Lense-Thirring spacetime, a variant which has particularly elegant features -- including unit lapse, intrinsically flat spatial 3-slices, and a separable Klein-Gordon equation (wave operator). This spacetime also possesses a non-trivial Killing tensor, implying separability of the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, the existence of a Carter constant, and complete formal integrability of the the geodesic equations. Herein we investigate the geodesics in some detail, in t…
We investigate a foliation of Schwarzschild spacetime determined by observers freely falling in the radial direction. This is described using a generalisation of Gullstrand-Painlevé coordinates which allows for any possible radial velocity. This foliation provides a contrast with the usual static foliation implied by Schwarzschild coordinates. The $3$-dimensional spaces are distinct for the static and falling observers, so the embedding diagrams, spatial measurement, simultaneity, and time at infinity are also distinct, though the $4$-dimensional spacetime is unchanged. Our motivation is conce…
Recently, the authors have formulated and explored a novel Painleve-Gullstrand variant of the Lense-Thirring spacetime, which has some particularly elegant features -- including unit-lapse, intrinsically flat spatial 3-slices, and some particularly simple geodesics, the "rain" geodesics. At linear level in the rotation parameter this spacetime is indistinguishable from the usual slow-rotation expansion of Kerr. Herein, we shall show that this spacetime possesses a nontrivial Killing tensor, implying separability of the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. Furthermore, we shall show that the Klein-Gordon …
Making use of the higher dimensional global embedding Minkowski spacetime (GEMS), we embed (3+1)-dimensional Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordström (RN) black holes written by the Painlevé-Gullstrand (PG) spacetimes, which have off-diagonal components in metrics, into (5+1)- and (5+2)-dimensional flat ones, respectively. As a result, we have shown the equivalence of the GEMS embeddings of the spacetimes with the diagonal and off-diagonal terms in metrics. Moreover, with the aid of their geodesic equations satisfying various boundary conditions in the flat embedded spacetimes, we directly obtain …
It is well known that static spherically symmetric spacetimes can admit foliations by flat spacelike hypersurfaces, which are best described in terms of the Painlevè--Gullstrand coordinates. The uniqueness and existence of such foliations were addressed earlier. In this paper, we prove, purely geometrically, that any possible foliation of a static spherically symmetric spacetime by an arbitrary codimension-one spherical spacelike geometry, up to time translation and rotation, is unique, and we find the algebraic condition under which it exists. This leads us to what can be considered as the mo…
The Painleve-Gullstrand coordinates are extended to describe the black hole in the cosmological environment: the Schwarzschild-de-Sitter black hole, which has two horizons. The extension is made using the Arnowitt-Deser-Misner formalism. In this extension, which describes the metric in the whole range of radial coordinates $0<r < \infty$, there is the point $r=r_0$ at which the shift function (velocity) changes sign. At this point the observer is at rest, while the observers at $r<r_0$ are free falling to the black hole and the observers at $r>r_0$ are free falling towards the cosmological hor…
The standard Lense-Thirring metric is a century-old slow-rotation large-distance approximation to the gravitational field outside a rotating massive body, depending only on the total mass and angular momentum of the source. Although it is not an exact solution to the vacuum Einstein equations, asymptotically the Lense-Thirring metric approaches the Kerr metric at large distances. Herein we shall discuss a specific variant of the standard Lense-Thirring metric, carefully chosen for simplicity, clarity, and various forms of "improved" behaviour, (to be more carefully defined in the body of the a…
Herein we explore the non-equatorial constant-$r$ ("quasi-circular") geodesics (both timelike and null) in the Painleve-Gullstrand variant of the Lense-Thirring spacetime recently introduced by the current authors. Even though the spacetime is not spherically symmetric, shells of constant-$r$ geodesics still exist. Whereas the radial motion is (by construction) utterly trivial, determining the allowed locations of these constant-$r$ geodesics is decidedly non-trivial, and the stability analysis is equally tricky. Regarding the angular motion, these constant-$r$ orbits will be seen to exhibit b…
Generalized Painleve-Gullstrand metrics are explicitly constructed for the Kerr-Newman family of charged rotating black holes. These descriptions are free of all coordinate singularities; moreover, unlike the Doran and other proposed metrics, an extra tunable function is introduced to ensure all variables in the metrics remain real for all values of the mass M, charge Q, angular momentum aM, and cosmological constant Λ> - 3/(a^2). To describe fermions in Kerr-Newman spacetimes, the stronger requirement of non-singular vierbein one-forms at the horizon(s) is imposed and coordinate singularities…
We find a specific coordinate system that goes from the Painlevé-Gullstrand partial extension to the Kruskal-Szekeres maximal extension and thus exhibit the maximal extension of the Schwarzschild metric in a unified picture. We do this by adopting two time coordinates, one being the proper time of a congruence of outgoing timelike geodesics, the other being the proper time of a congruence of ingoing timelike geodesics, both parameterized by the same energy per unit mass $E$. $E$ is in the range $1\leq E<\infty$ with the limit $E=\infty$ yielding the Kruskal-Szekeres maximal extension. So, thro…
The Kerr spacetime is perhaps the most astrophysically important of the currently known exact solutions to the Einstein field equations. Whenever spacetimes can be put in unit-lapse form it becomes possible to identify some very straightforward timelike geodesics, (the "rain" geodesics), making the physical interpretation of these spacetimes particularly clean and elegant. The most well-known of these unit-lapse formulations is the Painleve-Gullstrand form of the Schwarzschild spacetime, though there is also a Painleve-Gullstrand form of the Lense-Thirring (slow rotation) spacetime. More radic…
We present a quantum optics treatment of the near horizon behaviour of a quantum oscillator freely-falling into a pre-existing Schwarzschild black hole. We use Painleve-Gullstrand coordinates to define a global vacuum state. In contrast to an accelerated oscillator in the Minkowski vacuum, where there is no radiation beyond an initial transient, we find that the oscillator radiates positive energy to to infinity and negative energy into the black hole as it attempts to come into equilibrium with the ambient vacuum. We discuss the relationship of the model to Hawking radiation.
We consider spherically symmetric black holes in generic Lovelock gravity. Using geometrodynamical variables we do a complete Hamiltonian analysis, including derivation of the super-Hamiltonian and super-momentum constraints and verification of suitable boundary conditions for asymptotically flat black holes. Our analysis leads to a remarkably simple fully reduced Hamiltonian for the vacuum gravitational sector that provides the starting point for the quantization of Lovelock block holes. Finally, we derive the completely reduced equations of motion for the collapse of a spherically symmetric …
The Painlevé-Gullstrand coordinates allow us to explore the interior of the regular Hayward black hole. The behavior of an infalling particle in traversing the Hayward black hole is compared with the one inside the Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstrom singular black holes. When approaching the origin the test particle trajectories present differences depending if the center is regular or singular. The velocities of the infalling test particle into the modified Hayward black hole are analyzed as well. As compared with the normal Hayward, in the modified Hayward black hole the particle moves fas…
A static, spherically symmetric spacetime with negative pressures is conjectured inside a star. The gravitational field is repulsive and so a central singularity is avoided. The positive energy density and the pressures of the imperfect fluid are finite everywhere. The Tolman-Komar energy of the space is negative, as for a de Sitter geometry. From the Darmois-Israel junction conditions on the star surface one finds the constant length $b$ from the metric and the expression of the surface tension $σ$ of the thin shell separating the interior from the Schwarzschild exterior. Some properties of t…
A simple observation about the action for geodesics in a stationary spacetime with separable geodesic equations leads to a natural class of slicings of that spacetime whose orthogonal geodesic trajectories represent freely falling observers. The time coordinate function can then be taken to be the observer proper time, leading to a unit lapse function. This explains some of the properties of the original Painlevé-Gullstrand coordinates on the Schwarzschild spacetime and their generalization to the Kerr-Newman family of spacetimes, reproducible also locally for the Gödel spacetime. For the stat…
We thoroughly investigate conformally Schwarzschild spacetimes in different coordinate systems to seek for physically reasonable models of a cosmological black hole. We assume that a conformal factor depends only on the time coordinate and that the spacetime is asymptotically flat Friedmann-Lema\^ıtre-Robertson-Walker universe filled by a perfect fluid obeying a linear equation state $p=wρ$ with $w>-1/3$. In this class of spacetimes, the McClure-Dyer spacetime, constructed in terms of the isotropic coordinates, and the Thakurta spacetime, constructed in terms of the standard Schwarzschild coor…
We consider the metric of a generic axially symmetric rotating stationary black hole. The general approach is developed that enables us to construct coordinate frame regular near the horizon. As explicit examples, the Kerr and Kerr-Newmann-(anti-)de Sitter metrics are considered. It is shown how the rotational versions of the Painleve'-Gullstrand and Doran coordinates appear in this scheme as particular cases. For the 2+1 version of the metric the direct generalization of the Lemaître coordinate system is obtained. It is shown that the possibility of introducing a regular frame is indirectly r…
To see the back reaction of the Hawking radiation in a dynamical spacetime of the spherical gravitational collapse, we explicitly calculate the weak value of the energy-momentum tensor of the massless scalar field. The background geometry of a collapsing dust sphere is specified by using the Painleve-Gullstrand coordinates, in which the time coordinate coincides with the proper time of a free-falling observer and the metric tensor is regular at the event horizon. The result is that in the remote future the weak value diverges at the event horizon. We argue that since the semi-classical approxi…
We consider a very simple model for gravitational wave echoes from black hole merger ringdowns which may arise from local Lorentz symmetry violations that modify graviton dispersion relations. If the corrections are sufficiently soft so they do not remove the horizon, the reflection of the infalling waves which trigger the echoes is very weak. As an example, we look at the dispersion relation of a test scalar field corrected by roton-like operators depending only on spatial momenta, in Gullstrand-Painlevé coordinates. The near-horizon regions of a black hole do become reflective, but only very…
We study dynamical surface gravity in a general spherically symmetric setting using Painlevé-Gullstrand (PG) coordinates. Our analysis includes several definitions that have been proposed in the past as well as two new definitions adapted to PG coordinates. Various properties are considered, including general covariance, value at extremality, locality and static limit. We illustrate with specific examples of "dirty" black holes that even for spacetimes possessing a global timelike Killing vector, local definitions of surface gravity can differ substantially from "non-local" ones that require a…
The causal geodesics in the equatorial plane of a static extremal charged black holes in heterotic string theory are examined with regard to their geodesic stability, and compared with similar geodesics in the non-extremal situation. Extremization of the effective potential for time-like and null circular geodesics implies that in the extremal limit, the radius of ISCO(Inner-most Stable Circular Orbit) $(r_{ISCO})$, circular photon orbit (CPO) $(r_{ph})$ and marginally bound circular orbit (MBCO) $(r_{mb})$ are coincident with the event horizon $(r_{hor})$ i.e. $r_{ISCO}=r_{ph}=r_{mb}=r_{hor}=…
We present a novel family of slowly rotating black hole solutions in four, and higher dimensions, that extend the well known Lense-Thirring spacetime and solve the field equations to linear order in rotation parameter. As "exact metrics" in their own right, the new (non-vacuum) spacetimes feature the following two remarkable properties: i) near the black hole horizon they can be cast in the, manifestly regular, Painlevé-Gullstrand form and ii) they admit exact Killing tensor symmetries. We show these symmetries are inherited from the principal Killing-Yano tensor of the exact rotating black ho…
We present a model for studying the formation and evaporation of non-singular (quantum corrected) black holes. The model is based on a generalized form of the dimensionally reduced, spherically symmetric Einstein--Hilbert action and includes a suitably generalized Polyakov action to provide a mechanism for radiation back-reaction. The equations of motion describing self-gravitating scalar field collapse are derived in local form both in null co--ordinates and in Painleve--Gullstrand (flat slice) co--ordinates. They provide the starting point for numerical studies of complete spacetimes contain…
A Schwarzschild type solution in Regge calculus is considered. Earlier, we considered a mechanism of loose fixing of edge lengths due to the functional integral measure arising from integration over connection in the functional integral for the connection representation of the Regge action. The length scale depends on a free dimensionless parameter that determines the final functional measure. For this parameter and the length scale large in Planck units, the resulting effective action is close to the Regge action. Earlier, we considered the Regge action in terms of affine connection matrices …
The propagation of (massless) scalar, electromagnetic and gravitational waves on fixed Schwarzschild background spacetime is described by the general time-dependent Regge-Wheeler equation. We transform this wave equation to usual Schwarzschild, Eddington-Finkelstein, Painleve-Gullstrand and Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates. In the first three cases, but not in the last one, it is possible to separate a harmonic time-dependence. Then the resulting radial equations belong to the class of confluent Heun equations, i.e., we can identify one irregular and two regular singularities. Using the generalize…
