OK I've been skeptic about sharing this idea because as far fetched as it is I think I might, Just MIGHT, be on to something if this hasn't already been proposed/discovered, and therefore I claim all credit to this idea if it is original, if not then I need someone to slap me with a newspaper and tell me to do my science homework. So, I was thinking one day and I thought "Hmm.... if there is a point where the gravitational pull of a black hole is exactly equivalent to the speed of light (Event Horizon), would there then be photons orbiting the black hole for eternity and never falling past that point? Well I thought this out and if I'm correct photons are too tiny for tidal forces to have much affect if any on them, so therefore there could be an area just before you reach the event horizon of a black hole where photons are orbiting in the perfect position where they never escape or succumb to the gravity of the black hole. I call this speculative region the photohover region, now what would happen if nonillions (or more) of photons were orbiting a black hole perfectly and never changing their orbit? Heat, that would affect the matter spiraling into the black hole, helping the already stupidly powerful frictional forces in heating up matter thats being pulled into the black hole. And since the photons would be orbiting the black hole perfectly and their orbits would never change and they would never escape you wouldn't be able to see these photons in action, as no photons equals no light. Now when it comes to mathematics..... well.... uh... still stuck on trig and early calc..... so can't really propose any equations, but I will be able to hopefully back up this idea with some good mathematics in the near future if it passes the great minds on Science Forums. Anyways thanks for taking time to read my word salad, and if I need it grab that newspaper!

 

Sincerely,

 

TJ McCaustland

Edited June 17, 201510 yr by TJ McCaustland

It's called a photon sphere. You should be able to find relevant equations on Google if you're interested.

Edited June 17, 201510 yr by Delta1212

Oh wow *facepalm* Let me go ahead and apologize for my idiocy.....

By the way grab the New York times would you........

Don't beat yourself up. Pretty common.

As mentioned there is the photon sphere, however there is some uncertainly in how physical this is. In particular it is not stable and small perturbations will push the photons out of the sphere.

No need to facepalm - it is a rare and happy day in the Speculations Forum when we don't have to call for a tiny bit of maths to backup the wild guess; the maths is there and the guess wasn't that wild after all.

 

To spare you the mathematical trek the radius of the photon sphere, if it is actually physical, would be at one and a half times the schwartzchild radius for a vanilla schwartzchild black hole (of which there might not be any actual examples)

 

To really kipper your mind - a Kerr Black hole (spinning but not significantly charged - much more likely) doesn't get a photon sphere; it gets a band around its middle. In fact because of the dragging effect on space of the spinning black hole you can get multiple photon spheres - those photons orbiting in the plane of rotation can either be going with the rotation or against it; those orbitting with the rotation are in a nearer shell than those which orbit against rotation. Those photon that are in a polar orbit are in the same orbit as those around a S'Child black hole |( I think) as there is no dragging in that direction