Related papers: Seeing through a nearly black star
We have recently proposed a model for a regular black hole, or an ultra-compact object, that is premised on having maximally negative radial pressure throughout the entirety of the object's interior. This model can be viewed as that of a…
In this work, we focus on the situation where a significant amount of matter could be located close to the event horizon of the central black hole and how it affects the gravitational lensing signal. We consider a simple toy model where the…
We consider an observer who moves under the horizon of the Schwarzschild black hole and absorbs a photon. There are two different situations when (i) a photon comes from infinity, (ii) it is emitted by another observer under the horizon…
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…
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…
Can the observation of the "shadow" allow us to distinguish a black hole from a more exotic compact object? We study the motion of photons in a class of vacuum static axially-symmetric space-times that is continuously linked to the…
The Schwarzschild metric has a divergent energy density at the horizon, which motivates a new approach to black holes. If matter is spread uniformly throughout the interior of a supermassive black hole, with mass $M\sim M_\star= 2.34…
This investigation delves into the ringdown signals produced by semiclassical stars, which are ultra-compact, regular solutions of the Einstein equations incorporating stress-energy contributions from quantum vacuum polarization. These…
We show that low-energy photon scattering from a body with radius R slightly larger than its Schwarzschild radius r_s resembles black-hole absorption. This absorption occurs via capture to one of the many long-lived, densely packed…
Recent results of Trudinger on Isoperimetric Inequalities for non-convex bodies are applied to the gravitational collapse of a lightlike shell of matter to form a black hole. Using some integral identities for co-dimension two surfaces in…
We present heuristic arguments suggesting that if EM waves with wavelengths somewhat larger than the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole were fully absorbed by it, the second law of thermodynamics would be violated, under the Bekenstein…
We argue that a genuine image of the black hole viewed by a distant observer is not its shadow, but a more compact event horizon image probed by the luminous matter plunging into black hole. The external border of the black hole shadow is…
Light propagating from near a black hole horizon to the outside world is highly redshifted. In the limit that the emitter passes through the horizon, the redshift becomes infinite. In this sense the near horizon region is unobservable, as…
We analytically investigate the influence of a cosmic expansion on the shadow of the Schwarzschild black hole. We suppose that the expansion is driven by a cosmological constant only and use the Kottler (or Schwarzschild-deSitter) spacetime…
Galaxy mergers lead to the formation of massive black hole binaries which can accelerate background stars close to the speed of light. We estimate the comoving density of ejected stars with a peculiar velocity in excess of $0.1c$ or $0.5c$…
Recently, the image of a Schwarzschild black hole with an accretion disk has been revisited, and it showed that the "photon ring", defined as highly bent light rays that intersect the disk plane more than twice, is extremely narrow and…
We determine the angle of deflection of light by the gravitational field inside and outside a spherical body with a homogeneous mass density. We show that the largest deflections, which can be measured by weak gravitational lensing, are in…
Direct observation of black holes is one of the grand challenges in astronomy. If there are super-compact objects which possess unstable circular orbits of photons, however, it may be difficult to distinguish them from black holes by…
We show that the disruption of a star by a 10^6 solar mass black hole in a galactic nucleus could under favorable circumstances produce an optically-thick envelope that radiates with a thermal spectrum at the Eddington limit, 10^{44} erg/s,…
We describe the use of partially overlapping galaxies to provide direct measurements of the effective absorption in galaxy disks, independent of assumptions about internal disk structure. The non-overlapping parts of the galaxies and…