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Price's Law on Nonstationary Spacetimes

In this article we study the pointwise decay properties of solutions to the wave equation on a class of nonstationary asymptotically flat backgrounds in three space dimensions. Under the assumption that uniform energy bounds and a weak form of local energy decay hold forward in time we establish a $t^{-3}$ local uniform decay rate (Price's law \cite{MR0376103}) for linear waves. As a corollary, we also prove Price's law for certain small perturbations of the Kerr metric. This result was previously established by the second author in \cite{Tat} on stationary backgrounds. The present work was motivated by the problem of nonlinear stability of the Kerr/Schwarzschild solutions for the vacuum Einstein equations, which seems to require a more robust approach to proving linear decay estimates.