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Main Authors: Díaz-Guerra, David, Rincón, Ángel, Rubiera-Garcia, Diego
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01916
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author Díaz-Guerra, David
Rincón, Ángel
Rubiera-Garcia, Diego
author_facet Díaz-Guerra, David
Rincón, Ángel
Rubiera-Garcia, Diego
contents The characterization of the photon region -- i.e. the region of space-time filled with unstable bound null geodesics -- is critical to understand the behavior of radiation near a compact-enough object, such as black holes. However, its study has been typically focused on stationary space-times that leave outside interesting theoretical and phenomenological scenarios such as collapsing, accreting, or evaporating black holes, besides time-dependent configurations such as those found in some boson star models. In this work, we present a novel covariant approach to describe radiation in dynamical spherical space-times. This allows a general description of photon surfaces and their dynamics in non-static space-times, recovering well known expressions in the static limit and clarifying their meanings. Furthermore, we illustrate our results via several examples of dynamical scenarios in stellar collapse and accreting/evaporating models, and discuss the open caveats regarding such scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_01916
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Photon spheres in dynamical space-times
Díaz-Guerra, David
Rincón, Ángel
Rubiera-Garcia, Diego
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
The characterization of the photon region -- i.e. the region of space-time filled with unstable bound null geodesics -- is critical to understand the behavior of radiation near a compact-enough object, such as black holes. However, its study has been typically focused on stationary space-times that leave outside interesting theoretical and phenomenological scenarios such as collapsing, accreting, or evaporating black holes, besides time-dependent configurations such as those found in some boson star models. In this work, we present a novel covariant approach to describe radiation in dynamical spherical space-times. This allows a general description of photon surfaces and their dynamics in non-static space-times, recovering well known expressions in the static limit and clarifying their meanings. Furthermore, we illustrate our results via several examples of dynamical scenarios in stellar collapse and accreting/evaporating models, and discuss the open caveats regarding such scenarios.
title Photon spheres in dynamical space-times
topic General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01916