Self-lensing flares from black hole binaries I: general-relativistic ray tracing of black hole binaries

Understand

The self-lensing of a massive black hole binary (MBHB), which occurs when the two BHs are aligned close to the line of sight, is expected to produce periodic, short-duration flares.

• Here we study the shapes of self-lensing flares (SLFs) via general-relativistic ray tracing in a superimposed binary BH metric, in which the emission is generated by geometrically thin accretion flows around each component.
• The suite of models covers eccentric binary orbits, black hole spins, unequal mass binaries, and different emission model geometries.
• We explore the above parameter space, and report how the light curves change as a function of, e.g., binary separation, inclination, and eccentricity.