The march 1993 cover of Scientific American magazine inspired me for this question when I was a kid.
In: Physics
This is the [cover](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fd29xot63vimef3.cloudfront.net%2Fimage%2Fscientific-american%2F2184-4.jpg&tbnid=08RzlhYcg5M03M&vet=1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.coverbrowser.com%2Fcovers%2Fscientific-american%2F44&docid=EBig09nPps7OyM&w=420&h=558&itg=1&hl=en&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim%2Fm4%2F3&kgs=b9555c8fb00c18d1&shem=abme%2Ctrie) mentioned.
Yep. Black holes bend space, and light just goes in whatever space it’s bent. Inside the black hole, all directions point inward. That’s why it looks like light can’t “escape”. Near the edge, you can definitely just see your back. The circumference of the event horizon can be very big though, so you’d appear super far away.
Yes, just outside the event horizon you could see your backside whichever direction you look along the surface of the black hole.
The part of the orange ring that loops up above the black hole on images is just you seeing its accretion disk from a top-down perspective behind the black hole. The light is bent about 90 degrees.
Yes, light can theoretically orbit a black hole at a specific radius known as the photon sphere, which is about 1.5 times the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole. If you could stand at this radius and look in the direction of the orbital path, you could indeed see your back due to the extreme bending of light caused by the black hole’s intense gravitational field.
Yes! The light orbit distanceis the only sign you have entered the event horizon, as it is the place the event horizon is located. if you observed it and survived everything else, an intense flash (if your eyes somehow survived the accretion disk). It would be very hard to observe your body, which would take a while to go all the way around the black hole, and would look like it is the circumference of the black hole away from you. If you weren’t able to stay there long enough, with your eyes still working, you would notice the back of your body appear as if it was very, very far away. It would be hard to notice the difference between the very bright body and very bright not your body, as well. You would also look very color distorted due to intense gravity and would only see a small part of your body, as unless it was reflected in a very specific angle it would go into the black hole, so you would only see the side facing away from your body. And of course, this is assuming you survived all the problems with surviving a black hole.
Tl;dr: technically yes if you survived long enough to have the light reach from your back to your face, you would see your back look like it is the distance around the black hole away from you, if you were able to discern it from a severely bright flash of all the light orbiting the black hole. It would also look very wierd
We can now “see” black holes due to the accretion disk. The accretion disk is the planetary debris and stellar dust that orbits a black hole, as this debris spirals in towards the black hole it accelerates and heats up and that in turn means that it gives off electromagnetic radiation which can just about be observed from Earth. https://youtu.be/_sNvos8kfs8
A very loose definition of “see” here given that we “see” the light that bounces off objects. Given that the photons are in orbit due to such strong gravity, they’re not really going to reflect anyways.
But sure.
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