Can light get captured into orbit around a black hole?

Yes it can, but the orbits are very unstable to the slightest perturbation, and the photon quickly escapes or falls into the black hole. This leads to some interesting optical effects if you were to be located close to a black hole. The images of distant stars close to the edge of the black hole would be distorted into ring-shaped haloes, possible of different colors as a result of their differing gravitational red shifts.


Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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