Relativistic Self-similar Disks

Abstract

We formulate and solve by semi-analytic means the axisymmetric equilibria of relativistic self-similar disks of infinitesimal vertical thickness. These disks are supported in the horizontal directions against their self-gravity by a combination of isothermal (two-dimensional) pressure and a flat rotation curve. The dragging of inertial frames restricts possible solutions to rotation speeds that are always less than 0.438 times the speed of light, a result first obtained by Lynden-Bell and Pineault in 1978 for a cold disk. We show that prograde circular orbits of massive test particles exist and are stable for all of our model disks, but retrograde circular orbits cannot be maintained with particle velocities less than the speed of light once the disk develops an ergoregion. We also compute photon trajectories, planar and non-planar, in the resulting spacetime, for disks with and without ergoregions. We find that all photon orbits, except for a set of measure zero, tend to be focused by the gravity of the flattened mass-energy distribution toward the plane of the disk. This result suggests that strongly relativistic, rapidly rotating, compact objects may have difficulty ejecting collimated beams of matter or light along the rotation axes until the flows get well beyond the flattened parts of the relativistic mass distribution (which cannot happen in the self-similar models considered in this paper).