Multipole Moments of Stationary Spacetimes

Sammanfattning: In this thesis we study the relativistic multipole moments for stationary asymptotically flat spacetimes as introduced by Geroch and Hansen. These multipole moments give an asymptotic description of the gravitational field in a coordinate independent way.Due to this good description of the spacetimes, it is natural to try to construct a spacetime from only the set of multipole moments. Here we present a simple method to do this for the static axisymmetric case. We also give explicit solutions for the cases where the number of non-zero multipole moments are finite. In addition, for the general stationary axisymmetric case, we present methods to generate solutions.It has been a long standing conjecture that the multipole moments give a complete characterization of the stationary spacetimes. Much progress toward a proof has been made over the years. However, there is one remaining difficult task: to prove that a spacetime exists with an a-priori given arbitrary set of multipole moments subject to some given condition.Here we present such a condition for the axisymmetric case, and prove that it is both necessary and sufficient. We also extend this condition to the general case without axisymmetry, but in this case we only prove the necessity of our condition.