If light cannot escape a black hole, could light orbit a black hole, and in theory if you could stand in that spot and look in the direction of the orbital path, could you see your back?

Question

The march 1993 cover of Scientific American magazine inspired me for this question when I was a kid.

In: Physics

Answer 1

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