Circular orbits in Kerr-Taub-NUT spacetime and their implications for accreting black holes and naked singularities

Abstract: It has recently been proposed that the accreting collapsed object GRO J1655--40 could contain a non-zero gravitomagnetic monopole, and hence could be better described with the more general Kerr-Taub-NUT (KTN) spacetime, instead of the Kerr spacetime. This makes the KTN spacetime astrophysically relevant. In this paper, we study properties of various circular orbits in the KTN spacetime, and find the locations of circular photon orbits (CPOs) and innermost-stable-circular-orbits (ISCOs). Such orbits are important to interpret the observed X-ray spectral and timing properties of accreting collapsed objects, viz., black holes and naked singularities. Here we show that the usual methods to find the ISCO radius do not work for certain cases in the KTN spacetime, and we propose alternate ways. For example, the ISCO equation does not give any positive real radius solution for particular combinations of Kerr and NUT parameter values for KTN naked singularities. In such a case, accretion efficiency generally reaches $100\%$ at a particular orbit of radius $r=r_0$, and hence we choose $r=r_0$ as the `ISCO' for practical purposes.