Related papers: Comparing timelike geodesics around a Kerr black h…
Observations of the Sgr A* region in the galactic center confirm the presence of a large amount of matter in a small volume, leading to the consensus that a black hole exists there. However, dynamical observations cannot rule out the…
Millimeter very long baseline interferometry will soon produce accurate images of the closest surroundings of the supermassive compact object at the center of the Galaxy, Sgr A*. These images may reveal the existence of a central faint…
The existence of a massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, coinciding with the radio source Sgr A*, is being established on more and more solid ground. In principle, this black hole, acting as a gravitational lens, is able to…
One of the most interesting astronomical objects is the Galactic Center. We concentrate our discussion on a theoretical analysis of observational data of bright stars in the IR-band obtained with large telescopes. We also discuss the…
To evaluate a potential usually one analyzes trajectories of test particles. For the Galactic Center case astronomers use bright stars or photons, so there are two basic observational techniques to investigate a gravitational potential,…
The gravitational lensing of a finite star moving around a rotating Kerr black hole has been numerically calculated. Calculations for the direct image of the star and for the first and second light echoes have been performed for the star…
The evidence for supermassive Kerr black holes in galactic centers is strong and growing, but only the detection of gravitational waves will convincingly rule out other possibilities to explain the observations. The Kerr spacetime is…
Gravitational wave astronomy might allow us to detect the coalescence of low-brightness astrophysical compact objects which are extremely difficult to be observed with current electromagnetic telescopes. Besides classical sources like black…
General relativity makes clear predictions about the spacetime geometry around black holes. In the near future, new facilities will have the capability to explore the metric around SgrA$^*$, the supermassive black hole candidate at the…
Assuming that the compact source at the Galactic center, Sagittarius A*, is a massive boson star, we fit the near-infrared flare astrometry data. We consider 12 discrete boson star configurations and model the flare as a hotspot on a…
The nature of Galactic Center could be probed by lensing experiments capable of testing the spatial and velocity distributions of stars nearby and beyond it. Several hypotheses are possible (e.g. massive neutrino condensation, boson star)…
We examine the possibility of observing gravitational lensing in the weak deflection regime by the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy M31. This black hole is significantly more massive than the black hole in the center of…
Light rays passing very close to a black hole may experience very strong deviations. Two geometries were separately considered in the recent literature: a source behind the black hole (standard gravitational lensing); a source in front of…
Boson stars have attracted much attention in recent decades as simple, self-consistent models of compact objects and also as self-gravitating structures formed in some dark-matter scenarios. Direct detection of these hypothetical objects…
The massive black hole at the Galactic center Sgr A* is surrounded by a cluster of stars orbiting around it. Light from these stars is bent by the gravitational field of the black hole, giving rise to several phenomena: astrometric…
This is a pedagogical review of recent results on the interactions of central massive black holes with stars very near them, focused on the black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Table of contents: [1] Introduction [2] Stellar dynamics…
We study the geodesic motion of test particles in the space-time of non-compact boson stars. These objects are made of a self-interacting scalar field and -- depending on the scalar field's mass -- can be as dense as neutron stars or even…
We consider a Kerr black hole acting as a gravitational deflector within the geometrical optics, and point source approximations. The Kerr black hole gravitational lens geometry consisting of an observer and a source located far away and…
The galactic central black hole Sgr A* exhibits outbursts of radiation in the near infrared (so-called IR flares). One model of these events consists in a hotspot orbiting on the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) of the hole. These…
A new statistical method for pinpointing the massive black hole (BH) in the Galactic Center on the IR grid is presented and applied to astrometric IR observations of stars close to the BH. This is of interest for measuring the IR emission…