40-year Mystery Revisited: Newtonian System Mimics 'Baldness' Of Rotating Black Holes

Tuesday, February 24, 2009 - 23:28 in Astronomy & Space

In 1968, theoretical physicist and cosmologist Brandon Carter showed that a particle's wild gyrations while orbiting a rotating black hole nevertheless hold another variable fixed, which was named the "Carter constant," remaining somewhat mysterious 40 years later. Now Clifford M. Will, of Washington University has shown that, even in Newton's theory of gravitation, arrangements of masses exist whose gravitational field also admits a Carter-like constant of motion, in addition to energy and angular momentum.

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