Thread: Light travelling at a tangent to gravity near the EH of a black hole.

Light travelling at a tangent to gravity near the EH of a black hole. Well actually at the part where perpendicular light can escape ( photon sphere? ).

Does the same mechanism that causes hawking radiation have any special effect on a photon of light?

The thought i was having was based on the duality of light and the double slit experiment. Since light is a wave as well as a particle then near the EH there should be a place right near the EH ( or photon sphere) where if the particle was on one side it would be absorbed into the BH if it is on the other side then it would escape.

Also that there would be a certain amount of energy added from the gravity at that point.

I know my question is not straight forward ... but is there anything special that would happen to the wave of light when shown perpendicularly with and near the EH.

i thought that is what gravitational lensing is all about? light doesn't enter the event horizon ,but just skips off like a flat stone on water (the tangentally impinging light entering close to the the EH), to use a crude analogy.

Originally Posted by Chuck Sloan

i thought that is what gravitational lensing is all about? light doesn't enter the event horizon ,but just skips off like a flat stone on water (the tangentally impinging light entering close to the the EH), to use a crude analogy.

but if the light was close enough to the photon sphere ... so close that part of its wave was in the photon sphere but the rest outside ... then what happens? With the double slit experiment you cant predict which slit it is going to go through and it interferes with itself ... just wondering if in the case where part of the wave is inside and part is outside if anything strange would happen.

Also keep in mind that in hawking radiation the BH is a source of energy ... so would the BH actually put energy into the system?

Light traveling tangentially to gravity near any mass is bent twice as much as in Newtonian gravity under GR. So you can calculate the distance at which light orbits a black hole. It is directly related to BH radius.

My question ... although open ended ... is meant to be a bit deeper than this.

it is based off of the mechanism of Hawking radiation. My layman understanding is that Gravity is used as a source of energy so strong near the EH that it can ( by whatever means ) promote virtual particles ( or provides enough energy to emit the hawking radiation ( x2 ) ).

Now ... not realy sure how the experiement that I am proposing would work ... but lets say at a distance equal to where Hawking radiation is produced you shot a laser at a tangent to the BH in such a way that there is a SIGNIFIGANT difference in the path between the two amplitudes of the wave of light. So at a region of space time where the amplitude of the wave of light is stretched to the point where part of that wave can not recover to escape from the BH ( this should be somewhere inside the photon sphere ) while the other part could. The amplitude should be stretched signifigantly ( infinitely ??? or imaginarily? ). And energy, with gravity as the source, could be transferred to the photon particle in a similar manner that it would be transferred into the Virtual Particle system that creates hawking radiation.


Could a photon split in half, could it split into two photons? What would the feyman diagram look like when gravitational energy is added into a photon system?

Originally Posted by RayTomes

Light traveling tangentially to gravity near any mass is bent twice as much as in Newtonian gravity under GR. So you can calculate the distance at which light orbits a black hole. It is directly related to BH radius.