On the size of rotating black holes

Abstract

Recently a sequence of inequalities relating the black hole horizon, photon sphere, shadow were proposed for spherically symmetric and static black holes, providing the upper bound for given mass. In this paper, we extend the discussion to include rotating black holes. When viewed from the north pole direction, the shadow remains a round disk, but the image is skewed when viewed from the equatorial plane. After properly implementing the “size” parameters for the rotating black holes, we verify that the sequence of inequalities remain valid for a variety of solutions, including Kerr, Kerr–Newman, Kerr–Sen and Kerr–Cvetič–Youm black holes. The upshot is that rotation makes both the actual and apparent sizes of a black hole smaller.