Related papers: The geometry of photon surfaces
Photon spheres have attracted considerable interest in the studies of black holes and other astrophysical objects. For different categories of spacetimes (or gravitational sources), the existence of photon spheres and their distributions…
There are circular planar null geodesics at $r=3M$ around a Schwarzschild black hole of mass $M$. These geodesics form a photon sphere. Null geodesics of the Schwarzschild space-time which do not form the photon sphere are either escape to…
A photon surface $S$ is defined as a three-dimensional timelike hypersurface such that any null geodesic initially tangent to $S$ continues to be included in $S$, like $r=3M$ of the Schwarzschild spacetime. Using analytic solutions to…
A photon sphere is known as the geometrical structure shaping a black hole shadow. The mechanism is well understood for static or stationary black hole spacetimes such as the Schwarzschild and the Kerr spacetimes. In this paper, we…
Stability of a photon sphere, or stability of circular null geodesics on the sphere, plays a key role in its applications to astrophysics. For instance, an unstable photon sphere is responsible for determining the size of a black hole…
This paper defines the photon surface conditions using Cartan scalars within an invariant spin frame, offering a comprehensive description of the local spacetime geometry. By employing this approach, we gain novel insights into the geometry…
The photon sphere, a hypersurface of null circular geodesics, plays a fundamental role in characterizing black hole spacetimes, influencing phenomena such as black hole shadows, gravitational lensing, and quasinormal modes. In this work, we…
The black hole shadow is fundamentally connected to the structure of light rings and the photon region in the background geometry. We investigate the photon region boundary in a generic asymptotically flat, stationary, axisymmetric black…
Based on the geometry of the codimension-2 surface in a general spherically symmetric spacetime, we give a quasi-local definition of a photon sphere as well as a photon surface. This new definition is the generalization of the one by…
The photon sphere, a hypersurface of circular null geodesics, plays a fundamental role in characterizing black hole spacetimes, influencing phenomena such as black hole shadows, gravitational lensing, and quasinormal modes. While universal…
One of the most remarkable predictions of the general theory of relativity is the existence of black-hole "photonspheres", compact null hypersurfaces on which massless particles can orbit the central black hole. We prove that every…
The equations for the photon surface in spherical symmetry are worked out, starting from arXiv:gr-qc/0005050, in the most general dynamical setting. We show that the condition for a timelike hypersurface to be a photon surface can be…
For static black holes in Einstein gravity, if matter fields satisfy a few general conditions, we conjecture that three characteristic parameters about the spatial size of black holes, namely the outermost photon sphere area…
Horizons and bound photon orbits are defining features of black holes that translate into key features of black hole images. We present a purely geometric proof that spherically symmetric, isolated objects with horizons in gravity theories…
We have derived the differential equation governing the evolution of the photon sphere for dynamical black hole spacetimes with or without spherical symmetry. Numerical solution of the same depicting evolution of the photon sphere has been…
We study timelike, totally umbilic hypersurfaces -- called photon surfaces -- in $n+1$-dimensional static, asymptotically flat spacetimes, for $n+1\geq4$. First, we give a complete characterization of photon surfaces in a class of…
Under very general assumptions on the accretion flow geometry, images of a black hole illuminated by electromagnetic radiation display a sequence of photon rings (demagnified and rotated copies of the direct image) which asymptotically…
Photon surfaces are timelike, totally umbilic hypersurfaces of Lorentzian spacetimes. In the first part of this paper, we locally characterize all possible photon surfaces in a class of static, spherically symmetric spacetimes that includes…
Photon sphere has attracted significant attention since the capture of black hole shadow images by Event Horizon Telescope. Recently, a number of studies have highlighted that the number of photon spheres and their distributions near black…
In this work, we establish the existence conditions and a universal upper bound on the radius of stable photon spheres (SPS) outside the event horizons of static, spherically symmetric, asymptotically flat black holes surrounded by matter…