Testing the existence of regions of stable orbits at small radii around black hole candidates

Understand

Black hole candidates in X-ray binary systems and at the centers of galaxies are expected to be the Kerr black holes of General Relativity, but the actual nature of these objects has yet to be verified.

• In this paper, we consider the possibility that they are exotic compact objects and we describe their exterior gravitational field with a subclass of the Manko-Novikov metrics, which are exact solutions of the vacuum Einstein's equations and can describe the spacetime geometry around bodies with arbitrary mass-multipole moments.
• We point out that around a Manko-Novikov object there may exist many disconnected non-plunging regions at small radii, with no counterpart in the Kerr background, and that their existence may be tested.
• For instance, in the presence of an accretion disk, they may be filled by the accreting gas, forming a ring structure that might remind the rings of Saturn.