STANDING SHOCKS IN THE ROTATING WINDS AND ACCRETION IN KERR SPACETIME

We present the analytic theory of the Rankine-Hugoniot shocks in the rotating winds and accretion in Kerr geometry. We show the effects of coupling of the orbital angular momentum of the flow and the Kerr parameter. In general, for a given energy, a retrograde flow which includes a shock requires higher angular momentum than a prograde flow, and the locations of the critical points as well as the shocks are farther away from the black hole. For a given initial flow parameters such as the specific angular momentum and the energy, it is observed that as many as four formal shock locations are present, out of which two can be ruled out by employing the boundary conditions. It is conjectured that in a sufficiently dissipative flow such ambiguity in shock locations would disappear. Detailed classification of the parameter space in terms of the initial flow parameters will be discussed elsewhere.