Interpreting horizon-scale observations of astrophysical black holes demands a general understanding of null geodesics in the Kerr spacetime. These may be divided into two classes: “direct” rays that primarily determine the observational appearance of a given source, and highly bent rays that produce a nested sequence of exponentially demagnified images of the main emission: the so-called “photon ring.” We develop heuristics that characterize the direct rays and study the highly bent geodesics analytically. We define three critical parameters $\gamma$, $\delta$, and $\tau$ that respectively control the demagnification, rotation, and time delay of successive images of the source, thereby providing an analytic theory of the photon ring. These observable parameters encode universal effects of general relativity, independent of the details of the emitting matter.

• Received 2 November 2019
• Accepted 15 December 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.101.044031