Understand
The black hole shadow, first observed by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017, is the newest method for studying black holes and understanding gravity.
- Much work has gone into understanding the shadow of a Kerr black hole, including all of the complex astrophysics of the accretion disk, and there are numerous studies of the ideal shadow in non-Kerr black holes and exotic compact objects.
- This paper presents one of the first studies of the black hole shadow of non-Kerr black holes when the illumination source is an accretion disk.
- In particular, the ability of current and future very long baseline interformeters to estimate the physical parameters of the black hole spacetime and accretion disk is investigated using two different parametrized black hole metrics that encode a number of possible deviations from Kerr.