Photon emission from inside the innermost stable circular orbit

Abstract

We consider a situation where a light source orbiting the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) of the Kerr black hole is gently falling from the marginally stable orbit due to an infinitesimal perturbation. Assuming that the light source emits photons isotropically, we show that the last radius at which more than 50\% of emitted photons can escape to infinity is approximately halfway between the ISCO radius and the event horizon radius. To evaluate them, we determine emitter orbits from the vicinity of the ISCO, which are uniquely specified for each black hole spin, and identify the conditions for a photon to escape from any point on the equatorial plane of the Kerr spacetime to infinity by specifying regions in the two-dimensional photon impact parameter space completely. We further show that the proper motion of the emitter affects the photon escape probability and blueshifts the energy of emitted photons.