WOLFRAM|DEMONSTRATIONS PROJECT

Effective and Inertial Masses of a Photon Near a Black Hole for a Family of Envelope Orbits

​
minimum radius
r
0
1.6
Photons move along geodesic paths, which are bent in a gravitational field. This allows one to assume that the photon has a finite inertial mass. This Demonstration shows how the effective and inertial masses change as functions of the distance
r
to the center of gravity and the motion constant
h
for the photon's orbits near a black hole with minimum radius
r=
r
0
. The unit of distance is chosen as the Schwarzschild radius, such that
r
s
=1
.