Fueling and Carburetion: Breakup and Accretion of Stars and Gas Clouds

Abstract

In Chapter 7 we learned that black holes store energy in two different forms: (1) gravitational mass, which is expressed by the black hole mass parameter $M_\bullet$ (usually given in units of solar masses), and (2) rotational kinetic energy, which is embodied in the normalized angular momentum parameter

$$ j\equiv\frac{J}{(GM^{2}_{\bullet}/c)} $$

(11.1)

(with j lying in the range $-1\leq j \leq 1$).