What is the name of the effect where a rotating mass drags spacetime around it?

The effect in which a rotating mass drags spacetime around it is called frame-dragging. General relativity predicts that mass and energy shape spacetime, and a rotating body additionally twists the surrounding geometry through its angular momentum.

The effect was worked out in 1918 by Austrian physicists Josef Lense and Hans Thirring, so rotational frame-dragging is also called the Lense–Thirring effect. A nearby orbiting object or gyroscope can experience a gradual change in the orientation of its orbit or spin axis. The effect is extremely small around ordinary bodies such as Earth, but it becomes much stronger near rapidly rotating compact objects.

NASA’s Gravity Probe B mission measured frame-dragging around Earth using ultra-sensitive gyroscopes. Around a rotating black hole, the effect is especially dramatic inside the ergosphere, a region outside the event horizon where objects cannot remain stationary relative to distant stars and are forced to co-rotate with the hole.

Frame-dragging is not the same as tidal force, which stretches and compresses objects, or gravitational lensing, which bends light. Geodetic precession is another relativistic precession effect, but it arises from curved spacetime along an orbit rather than specifically from the central body’s rotation.