2024/07/18 by Francesco Di Filippo, Luciano Rezzolla · 1 voice · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Geophysics and Sensor Technology #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.HE #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.111.l021504
arxiv published 2024/07/18 · openalex publication_date 2025/01/14 · arxiv updated 2025/01/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
In a spherically symmetric and static spacetime of a compact object, such as that of a Schwarzschild black hole, the light-ring is a two-sphere where photons experience the only possible circular orbits. As a ``gedanken experiment,'' we imagine an advanced civilization able to populate the light-ring of a nonrotating black hole of mass M with photons having a fine-tuned impact parameter that allows their orbits to be exactly circular with radius r=3M. As the number of photons in the light-ring increases in time, its mass will no longer be negligible, and hence it will impact on the background spacetime; that is, it will ``self-gravitate.'' We here consider two different routes to assign a nonzero mass to the light-ring that are either based on a discrete concentration of photons on a specific radial location or on a suitable distribution of photons in a given region. In both cases, and using the Einstein equations, we find that the inclusion of the energy from the accumulated photons leads to the generation of new light-rings. Such new light-rings can either appear at well-defined but discrete locations, or be fused in a well-defined region. In either case, we show that such light-ring configurations are dynamically unstable and a small perturbation, either via the inclusion of an additional photon onto the light-ring or via the absorption of a photon by the black hole, leads to a catastrophic destruction of the light-ring structures.