Related papers: Light Propagation Prescriptions for Black Hole Mov…
The images of supermassive black holes surrounded by optically-thin, radiatively-inefficient accretion flows, like those observed with the Event Horizon Telescope, are characterized by a bright ring of emission surrounding the black-hole…
Accelerating black holes, connected to cosmic strings could evolve to supermassive black holes. However, if they are going to take part in structure formation and resides at the center of galaxies, their acceleration should be small. This…
We model the light-curves from radiation-driven clouds near an accreting black hole. Taking into account the multiple images due to strong gravitational lensing, we find that sharp spikes can significantly enhance the observed flux.…
Hotspots, often characterized as pointlike emissions, frequently appear near black holes with significantly enhanced luminosity compared to the surrounding accretion flow. Notably, such hotspots are regularly observed near the black hole at…
The photon sphere defines the unstable circular orbit of photons in a black hole spacetime. Photons emitted by a source located inside the photon sphere can be gravitationally lensed by the black hole and have time delays when reaching the…
We study the time delay between two relativistic images due to strong gravitational lensing of the light rays caused by the Kerr and Kerr-Newman black holes. The trajectories of the light rays are restricted on the equatorial plane. Using…
Light passing near a black hole can follow multiple paths from an emission source to an observer due to strong gravitational lensing. Photons following different paths take different amounts of time to reach the observer, which produces an…
The analysis of optical images of galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lensing systems can provide important information about the distribution of dark matter at small scales. However, the modeling and statistical analysis of these images is…
The gravitational field of a galaxy can act as a lens and deflect the light emitted by a more distant object such as a quasar. Strong gravitational lensing causes multiple images of the same quasar to appear in the sky. Since the light in…
A black hole's gravitational pull can deflect light rays to an arbitrary degree. As a result, any source fluctuation near the black hole creates multiple lagged images on an observer's screen. For optically thin stochastic emission, these…
Accelerating supermassive black holes, connected to cosmic strings, could contribute to structure formation and get captured by galaxies if their velocities are small. This would mean that the acceleration of these black holes is small too.…
The deflection of light in the gravitational field of a massive body can be analyzed through diverse theoretical approaches. The null geodesic approach is commonly employed to calculate light deflection within strong and weak field limits.…
The distribution of differential time delays \Delta t between images produced by strong gravitational lensing contains information on the mass distributions in the lensing objects as well as on cosmological parameters such as H_0. We derive…
Future black hole (BH) imaging observations are expected to resolve finer features corresponding to higher-order images of hotspots and of the horizon-scale accretion flow. In spherical spacetimes, the image order is determined by the…
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…
Black hole shadow images are primarily determined by the properties of photon spheres and can exhibit degeneracies across different spherically symmetric spacetime geometries. We show that time delay observables associated with higher-order…
Gravitational microlensing constraints on non-standard compact objects are conventionally derived assuming lenses trace the dark matter halo with velocities following a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution centered around $10^{-3}c$. However, a…
We study the time variation of the apparent flux of cosmological point sources due to the transient weak lensing by dark matter microhaloes. Assuming a transverse motion of microhaloes with respect to our line of sight, we derive 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…
Propagation of light in nonlinear materials is here studied in the regime of the geometrical optics. It is shown that a spherically symmetric medium at rest with some specific dielectric properties can be used to produce an exact analogue…