English

Image of a wormhole with an arbitrary throat profile

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2026-05-20 v2

Abstract

We investigate the observable signatures -- the shadow, the throat silhouette, and the image of a thin accretion disk -- for a family of static, spherically symmetric wormholes with an arbitrary throat profile. First, we derive expressions for the shadow radius, the throat silhouette radius, and the photon energy shift for a general static, spherically symmetric metric. Then we apply these results to a specific wormhole metric containing three free parameters: the throat radius~aa, the throat length~λ\lambda, and the parameter~u0u_0 that controls the depth of the gravitational well. We numerically obtain the shadow and silhouette radii as functions of λ\lambda, u0u_0, and aa, construct accretion disk images for three representative parameter sets, and compare the results with those for a Schwarzschild black hole. We find that there exist sets of parameters aa, λ\lambda, u0u_0 such that the wormhole shadow and throat silhouette radii coincide with the shadow and event horizon silhouette of a Schwarzschild black hole of the same mass. Nevertheless, the accretion disk images of these objects differ substantially. In wormhole images, the Doppler effect plays a major role, not the gravitational redshift. As a result, the accreting wormhole images appear brighter.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.16413,
  title  = {Image of a wormhole with an arbitrary throat profile},
  author = {Valeria A. Ishkaeva and Sergey V. Sushkov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.16413},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

15 pages, 20 figures