Observing the Shadows of Stellar-Mass Black Holes with Binary Companions

Understand

The observation of the shadows cast by the event horizon of black holes on the light emitted in its neighborhood is the target of current very-long-baseline-interferometric observations.

• When considering supermassive black holes, the light source is the black hole's accretion disk, and therefore, the observation of the shadow may reveal information about the black hole and the accretion flow.
• We here study the shadows cast by stellar-mass black holes that are illuminated not by an accretion disk but by a stellar companion in a wide binary orbit.
• We calculate the shadows produced in such a configuration for the first time and show snapshots of the time-dependent shadow "movie" that is generated.