Isotropic Coordinates

Isotropic Coordinates

In the theory of Lorentzian manifolds, spherically symmetric spacetimes admit a family of nested round spheres. There are several different types of coordinate chart which are adapted to this family of nested spheres; the best known is the Schwarzschild chart, but the isotropic chart is also often useful. The defining characteristic of an isotropic chart is that its radial coordinate (which is different from the radial coordinate of a Schwarschild chart) is defined so that light cones appear round. This means that (except in the trivial case of a locally flat manifold), the angular isotropic coordinates do not faithfully represent distances within the nested spheres, nor does the radial coordinate faithfully represent radial distances. On the other hand, angles in the constant time hyperslices are represented without distortion, hence the name of the chart.

Isotropic charts are most often applied to static spherically symmetric spacetimes in metric theories of gravitation such as general relativity, but they can also be used in modeling a spherically pulsating fluid ball, for example. For isolated spherically symmetric solutions of the Einstein field equation, at large distances, the isotropic and Schwarzschild charts become increasingly similar to the usual polar spherical chart on Minkowski spacetime.