Image of a wormhole with an arbitrary throat profile
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~, the throat length~, and the parameter~ that controls the depth of the gravitational well. We numerically obtain the shadow and silhouette radii as functions of , , and , 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 , , 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