Big Black Hole, Little Neutron Star: Magnetic Dipole Fields in the Rindler Spacetime

Understand

As a black hole and neutron star approach during inspiral, the field lines of a magnetized neutron star eventually thread the black hole event horizon and a short-lived electromagnetic circuit is established.

• The black hole acts as a battery that provides power to the circuit, thereby lighting up the pair just before merger.
• Although originally suggested as a promising electromagnetic counterpart to gravitational-wave detection, the luminous signals are promising more generally as potentially detectable phenomena, such as short gamma-ray bursts.
• To aid in the theoretical understanding, we present analytic solutions for the electromagnetic fields of a magnetic dipole in the presence of an event horizon.