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Schwarzschild solution in Schwarzschild coordinates, with two space dimensions suppressed, leaving just the time t and the distance from the center r. In red the incoming null geodesics. In blue outcoming null geodesics. In green the null light cones on which borders light moves, while massive objects move inside the cones.
But another well known generalization of the Schwarzschild vacuum, the Taub–NUT space, is not asymptotically flat. An even simpler generalization, the de Sitter-Schwarzschild metric solution, which models a spherically symmetric massive object immersed in a de Sitter universe , is an example of an asymptotically simple spacetime which is not ...
Here, saying that = is irrotational means that the vorticity tensor of the corresponding timelike congruence vanishes; thus, this Killing vector field is hypersurface orthogonal. The fact that our spacetime admits an irrotational timelike Killing vector field is in fact the defining characteristic of a static spacetime .
In Einstein's theory of general relativity, the Schwarzschild metric (also known as the Schwarzschild solution) is an exact solution to the Einstein field equations that describes the gravitational field outside a spherical mass, on the assumption that the electric charge of the mass, angular momentum of the mass, and universal cosmological constant are all zero.
where is the Ricci curvature tensor and is the Ricci scalar curvature (obtained by taking successive traces of the Riemann tensor). The Ricci tensor vanishes in vacuum spacetimes (such as the Schwarzschild solution mentioned above), and hence there the Riemann tensor and the Weyl tensor coincide, as do their invariants.
The metric tensor is a central object in general relativity that describes the local geometry of spacetime (as a result of solving the Einstein field equations). Using the weak-field approximation, the metric tensor can also be thought of as representing the 'gravitational potential'. The metric tensor is often just called 'the metric'.
Vacuum solutions are also distinct from the lambdavacuum solutions, where the only term in the stress–energy tensor is the cosmological constant term (and thus, the lambdavacuums can be taken as cosmological models). More generally, a vacuum region in a Lorentzian manifold is a region in which the Einstein tensor vanishes.
For example, the Schwarzschild radius r s of the Earth is roughly 9 mm (3 ⁄ 8 inch); at the surface of the Earth, the corrections to Newtonian gravity are only one part in a billion. The Schwarzschild radius of the Sun is much larger, roughly 2953 meters, but at its surface, the ratio r s /r is roughly 4 parts in a