Hunting for extra dimensions in the shadow of M87*

Understand

The Event Horizon Telescope has recently provided the first image of the dark shadow around the supermassive black hole M87*.

• The observation of a highly circular shadow provides strong limits on deviations of M87*'s quadrupole moment from the Kerr value.
• We show that the absence of such a deviation can be used to constrain the physics of extra dimensions of spacetime.
• Focusing on the Randall-Sundrum AdS$_5$ brane-world scenario, we show that the observation of M87*'s dark shadow sets the limit $\ell \lesssim 170\,{\rm AU}$, where $\ell$ is the AdS$_5$ curvature radius.