Related papers: Photon Rings Around Warped Black Holes
Light circling around an astrophysical black hole can spend a long time skirting its unstably bound photon orbits before escaping to infinity. To a distant observer, this orbiting light would appear as a bright ring encircling the image of…
Space-based next-generation interferometers propose to measure the Lyapunov exponents of the nearly bound geodesics that comprise the photon ring surrounding the black hole M87*. We argue that these classical Lyapunov exponents equal the…
Under very general assumptions on the accretion flow geometry, images of a black hole illuminated by electromagnetic radiation display a sequence of photon rings (demagnified and rotated copies of the direct image) which asymptotically…
We study the physics of photon rings in a wide range of axisymmetric black holes admitting a separable Hamilton-Jacobi equation for the geodesics. Utilizing the Killing-Yano tensor, we derive the Penrose limit of the black holes, which…
Very-long baseline interferometric observations have resolved structure on scales of only a few Schwarzschild radii around the supermassive black holes at the centers of our Galaxy and M87. In the near future, such observations are expected…
The bright ring-like structures observed in the images of M87* and SgrA* captured by the Event Horizon Telescope strongly support the validity of general relativity. Lensed images of the emission region, often referred to as photon rings in…
The bell-like ringdown of the gravitational field in the last stage of the merging of massive black holes is now routinely detected on earth by the last generation of gravitational wave detectors. Its spectrum is interpreted as a sum of…
We consider a class of static and spherically symmetric black hole geometries endowed with a photon sphere. On the one hand, we show that close to the photon sphere, a massless scalar field theory exhibits a simple dynamical…
We propose a new test of strong-field general relativity (GR) based on the universal interferometric signature of the black hole photon ring. The photon ring is a narrow ring-shaped feature, predicted by GR but not yet observed, that…
We investigate whether photon ring observations in black hole imaging are able to distinguish between the Kerr black hole in general relativity and alternative black holes that deviate from Kerr. Certain aspects of photon rings have been…
We study the quantum chaos bound in the photon ring region surrounding black holes. By evaluating the Lyapunov exponent associated with unstable null geodesics in a broad class of generalized Kerr geometries, as well as the temperature…
There is a well-known, intuitive geometric correspondence between high-frequency QNMs of Schwarzschild black holes and null geodesics that reside on the light-ring : the real part of the mode's frequency relates to the geodesic's orbital…
Black hole images are theoretically predicted (under mild astrophysical assumptions) to display a stack of lensed "photon rings" that carry information about the underlying spacetime geometry. Despite vigorous efforts, no such ring has been…
The Kerr black holes possess a photon region with prograde and retrograde orbits radii, respectively, $M\leq r_p^-\leq 3M$ and $3M\leq r_p^+\leq 4M$, and thereby always cast a closed photon ring or a shadow silhouette for $a\leq M$. For…
High-frequency very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) observations can now resolve the horizon-scale emission from sources in the immediate vicinity of nearby supermassive black holes. Future space-VLBI observations will access highly…
For a static and spherically symmetric black hole, a photon sphere is composed of circular null geodesics of fixed radius, and plays an important role in observing the black hole. Recently, in an Einstein-Maxwell-scalar model with a…
In the presence of a black hole, light sources connect to observers along multiple paths. As a result, observed brightness fluctuations must be correlated across different times and positions in black hole images. Photons that execute…
General relativity predicts that black hole images ought to display a bright, thin (and as-of-yet-unresolved) ring. This "photon ring" is produced by photons that explore the strong gravity of the black hole, flowing along trajectories that…
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration recently released horizon-scale images of the supermassive black hole M87*. These images are consistently described by an optically thin, lensed accretion flow in the Kerr spacetime. General…
We examine the motion of the massless scalar field and nearly bound null geodesics in the near-ring region of a black hole, which may possess either acceleration or a gravitomagnetic mass. Around such black holes, the photon ring deviates…