We study the geodesic motion of massive and massless test particles in the background of equally spinning Myers–Perry–anti-de Sitter (AdS) black holes in five dimensions. By adopting a coordinate system that makes manifest the cohomogeneity-1 property of these spacetimes, the equations of motion simplify considerably. This allows us to easily separate the radial motion from the angular part and to obtain solutions for angular trajectories in a compact closed form. For the radial motion, we focus our attention on spherical orbits. In particular, we determine the timelike innermost stable circular orbits (ISCOs) for these asymptotically AdS spacetimes, as well as the location of null circular orbits. We find that the ISCO dives below the ergosurface for black holes rotating close to extremality and merges with the event horizon exactly at extremality, in analogy with the four-dimensional Kerr case. For sufficiently massive black holes in AdS, there exists a spin parameter range in which the background spacetime is stable against superradiance and the ISCO lies inside the ergoregion. Our results for massless geodesics show that there are no stable circular null orbits outside the horizon, but there exist such orbits inside the horizon, as well as around overextremal spacetimes, i.e., naked singularities. We also discuss how these orbits deform from the static to the rotating case.

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• Physical Sciences - Natural Sciences