The flashy disappearance of a star falling behind the horizon of a black hole

University of Ljubljana, Department of Physics, Jadranska 19, 61000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

Send offprint request to: A. Čadež

Received: 6 December 1995
Accepted: 7 March 1996

Abstract

We present calculations and images of the appearance of a point-like star while heading toward and disappearing behind the horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole. A complete review of equations of motion and their solutions is given in Sect. 2, and Sect. 3 describes the properties of the star as the light source. The results of numerical simulations are shown in 26 figures and some phenomena responsible for their appearance are discussed in Sect. 4. It is possible that such phenomena are relevant for the description of certain activities related to galactic black holes and also for the description of γ-ray burstars.