A FAST NEW PUBLIC CODE FOR COMPUTING PHOTON ORBITS IN A KERR SPACETIME
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- 27 April 2009
- journal article
- Published by American Astronomical Society in The Astrophysical Journal
- Vol. 696 (2) , 1616-1629
- https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637x/696/2/1616
Abstract
Relativistic radiative transfer problems require the calculation of photon trajectories in curved spacetime. We present a novel technique for rapid and accurate calculation of null geodesics in the Kerr metric. The equations of motion from the Hamilton-Jacobi equation are reduced directly to Carlson's elliptic integrals, simplifying algebraic manipulations and allowing all coordinates to be computed semi-analytically for the first time. We discuss the method, its implementation in a freely available FORTRAN code, and its application to toy problems from the literature.Keywords
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