Related papers: Photon Ring Astrometry for Superradiant Clouds
Extreme gravitational lensing refers to the bending of photon trajectories that pass very close to supermassive black holes and that cannot be described in the conventional weak deflection limit. A complete analytical description of the…
Circular photon orbit and black hole shadow are significantly important issues in physics and astronomy, and a number of breakthroughs have been witnessed in recent years. Conventionally, the stable and unstable circular photon orbits are…
Ultralight bosons can induce superradiant instabilities in spinning black holes, tapping their rotational energy to trigger the growth of a bosonic condensate. Possible observational imprints of these boson clouds include (i) direct…
The Black Hole Explorer (BHEX), an orbiting, multi-band, millimeter radio-telescope, in hybrid combination with millimeter terrestrial radio-telescopes, is designed to discover and measure the thin photon ring around the supermassive black…
The interest in the implications that astrophysical observations have for the understanding of the structure of black holes has grown since the first detection of gravitational waves. Many arguments that are put forward in order to…
The photon ring, shadow and observational appearance of the emission originating near a charged black-bounce are investigated. Based on the geodesic analysis, we determine the upper and lower limits of critical impact parameters of a…
Ultralight bosons and axion-like particles appear naturally in different scenarios and could solve some long-standing puzzles. Their detection is challenging, and all direct methods hinge on unknown couplings to the Standard Model of…
Superradiant instabilities of spinning black holes can be used to impose strong constraints on ultralight bosons, thus turning black holes into effective particle detectors. However, very little is known about the development of the…
Spectral features can arise by reflection of coronal X-rays on a black hole accretion disc. The resulting profile bears various imprints of strong gravitational field acting on the light emitting gas. The observed shape of the reflection…
Ultralight bosons can be excited around spinning black holes via black hole superradiance. These boson clouds may play an important role in the orbital evolution of binary black holes. In this work, we investigate the formation and…
We analyze gravitational lensing, in particular the shadow and photon rings, in the Ernst spacetime, also known as the Schwarzschild-Melvin spacetime, which describes a Schwarzschild black hole immersed in a homogenous magnetic field.…
Black hole images present an annular region of enhanced brightness. In the absence of propagation effects, this "photon ring" has universal features that are completely governed by general relativity and independent of the details of the…
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…
Images of black holes encode both astrophysical and gravitational properties. Detecting highly-lensed features in images can differentiate between these two effects. We present an accretion disk emission model coupled to the Adaptive…
Gravitational lensing of luminous matter that surrounds a black hole or some other sufficiently compact object produces an infinite sequence of images. Besides the direct (or primary) image, it comprises demagnified and deformed replicas of…
Black hole superradiance is a powerful probe of ultralight axions. If nature contains a boson with a mass of order $10^{-12}\,$eV, $\textit{mere vacuum fluctuations}$ will lead to its efficient production around spinning stellar mass black…
Interpreting horizon-scale observations of astrophysical black holes demands a general understanding of null geodesics in the Kerr spacetime. These may be divided into two classes: "direct" rays that primarily determine the observational…
The imaging by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) of the supermassive central objects at the heart of the M87 and Milky Way (Sgr A$^\star$) galaxies, has marked the first step into peering at the photon rings and central brightness…
Scalar-tensor theories predict fundamental scalar fields of considerable interest in astrophysics and cosmology. We investigate the superradiant instability of scalar clouds around Kerr black holes, showing that stimulated decay generates…
Ultralight bosons are predicted in many extensions to the Standard Model and are popular dark matter candidates. The black hole superradiance mechanism allows for these particles to be probed using only their gravitational interaction. In…