A Survey of Spherically Symmetric Spacetimes

Understand

We survey many of the important properties of spherically symmetric spacetimes as follows.

• We present several different ways of describing a spherically symmetric spacetime and the resulting metrics.
• We then focus our discussion on an especially useful form of the metric of a spherically symmetric spacetime in polar-areal coordinates and its properties.
• In particular, we show how the metric component functions chosen are extremely compatible with notions in Newtonian mechanics.