A Fast New Public Code for Computing Photon Orbits in a Kerr Spacetime

Abstract

Relativistic radiative transfer problems require the calculation of photon trajectories in curved spacetime. We present a novel technique for rapid and accurate calculation of null geodesics in the Kerr metric. The equations of motion from the Hamilton-Jacobi equation are reduced directly to Carlson's elliptic integrals, simplifying algebraic manipulations and allowing all coordinates to be computed semi-analytically for the first time. We discuss the method, its implementation in a freely available FORTRAN code, and its application to toy problems from the literature.

15 pages, 10 figures, accepted by ApJ