Innermost stable circular orbit and shadow of the 4D Einstein–Gauss–Bonnet black hole

Abstract

Abstract Recently, a novel 4D Einstein–Gauss–Bonnet gravity was formulated by Glavan and Lin (Phys Rev Lett 124(8):081301, 2020). Although whether the theory is well defined is currently debatable, the spherically symmetric black hole solution is still meaningful and worthy of study. In this paper, we study the geodesic motions in the spacetime of the spherically symmetric black hole solution. First of all, we find that a negative GB coupling constant is allowable, as in which case the singular behavior of the black hole can be hidden inside the event horizon. Then we calculate the innermost stable circular orbits for massive particles, which turn out to be monotonic decreasing functions of the GB coupling constant. Furthermore, we study the unstable photon sphere and shadow of the black hole. It is interesting to find that the proposed universal bounds on black hole size in Lu and Lyu (Phys Rev D 101(4):044059, 2020) recently can be broken when the GB coupling constant takes a negative value.