How a particle may stand still in rotating spacetime

How a particle may stand still in rotating spacetime

6 years ago
Anonymous $CLwNLde341

https://phys.org/news/2018-05-particle-rotating-spacetime.html

"Our work presents with extreme simplicity a long-ignored feature of certain spacetimes that is quite counterintuitive," Collodel told Phys.org. "General relativity has been around for a bit more than a hundred years now and it never ceases to amaze, and exploring the ways that different distributions of energy can warp the geometry of spacetime in a non-trivial way is key to a deeper understanding."

In their paper, the physicists identify two criteria for a particle to remain at rest with respect to a static observer in a rotating spacetime. First, the particle's angular momentum (basically its own rotation) must have just the right value so that it perfectly cancels out the rotation due to frame dragging. Second, the particle must be located precisely in the static orbit, a ring around the center of the rotating spacetime at which the particle is neither pulled toward the center nor pushed away.