Energy loss can actually kick a particle away from a black hole instead of letting it fall in.
March 19, 2026
Original Paper
Electromagnetic radiation-reaction near black holes: orbital widening and the role of the tail
arXiv · 2603.17728
The Takeaway
Logic suggests that as a particle radiates energy, it should lose speed and spiral into a black hole, but researchers found that electromagnetic 'push-back' can actually widen its orbit instead. This means that under the right conditions, a particle’s own radiation acts like a thruster, moving it to a safer distance from the gravitational abyss.
From the abstract
We investigate the orbital evolution of a classical charged particle around a Schwarzschild black hole immersed in an external, uniform magnetic field, taking into full account both local radiation-reaction and the nonlocal tail self-force arising in curved spacetime. Starting from the DeWitt-Brehme equation and its Landau-Lifshitz reduction, we derive analytic expressions for the conservative and dissipative components of the electromagnetic self-force in both the weak-field (Newtonian) and str