https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-025-14435-z
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
A general discussion on photon spheres in different categories of spacetimes
1
College of Science, Chongqing University of Technology, Banan, 400054, Chongqing, China
2
College of Physics and New Energy, Chongqing University of Technology, Banan, 400054, Chongqing, China
3
School of Physics and Electronic Science, Hunan University of Science and Technology, 411201, Xiangtan, Hunan, China
Received:
22
March
2025
Accepted:
15
June
2025
Published online:
28
June
2025
Photon spheres have attracted considerable interest in the studies of black holes and other astrophysical objects. For different categories of spacetimes (or gravitational sources), the existence of photon spheres and their distributions are dramatically influenced by the geometric and topological properties of spacetimes and characteristics of the corresponding gravitational fields. In this work, we carry out a geometric analysis on photon spheres for different categories of spacetime (including black hole spacetime, ultra-compact object’s spacetime, regular spacetime, and naked singularity spacetime). Some universal properties and conclusions are obtained for these spacetimes. We mostly focus on the existence of photon spheres, the total number of photon spheres 
, the subtraction of stable photon sphere and unstable photon sphere 
in different categories of spacetimes. These conclusions are derived solely from geometric properties of optical geometry of spacetimes, irrelevant to the specific spacetime metric forms. Besides, our results successfully recover some important theorems on photon spheres proposed in recent years.
© The Author(s) 2025
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Funded by SCOAP3.
