Gravitational Bending of Light Near Compact Objects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A photon emitted near a compact object at an angle $\alpha$ with respect to the radial direction escapes to infinity at a different angle $\psi>\alpha$. This bending of light is caused by a strong gravitational field. We show that, in a Schwarzschild metric, the effect is described by $1-\cos\alpha=(1-\cos\psi)(1-r_g/R)$ where $R/r_g$ is the emission radius in Schwarzschild units. The formula is approximate and it applies at $R\geq 2r_g$ only, however at these radii it has amazing accuracy, fully sufficient in many applications. As one application we develop a new formulation for the light bending effects in pulsars. It reveals the simple character of these effects and gives their quantitative description with practically no losses of accuracy (for the typical radius of a neutron star $R=3r_g$ the error is 1%). The visible fraction of a star surface is shown to be $S_v/4\pi R^2=[2(1-r_g/R)]^{-1}$ which is 3/4 for $R=3r_g$. The instantaneous flux of a pulsar comes from one or two antipodal polar caps that rotate in the visible zone. The pulse produced by one blackbody cap is found to be sinusoidal (light bending impacts the pulse amplitude but not its shape). When both caps are visible, the pulse shows a plateau: the variable parts of the antipodal emissions precisely cancel each other. The pulsed fraction of blackbody emission with antipodal symmetry has an upper limit $A_{max}=(R-2r_g)/(R+2r_g)$. Pulsars with $A>A_{max}$ must be asymmetric.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".