Gravitational lensing of stars orbiting the Massive Black Hole in the Galactic Center

Abstract

The existence of a massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, coinciding with the radio source Sgr A*, is being established on more and more solid ground. In principle, this black hole, acting as a gravitational lens, is able to bend the light emitted by stars moving within its neighborhood, eventually generating secondary images. Extending a previous analysis of the gravitational lensing phenomenology to a new set of 28 stars, whose orbits have been well determined by recent observations, we have calculated all the properties of their secondary images, including time and magnitude of their luminosity peaks and their angular distances from the central black hole. The best lensing candidate is represented by the star S6, since the magnitude of its secondary image at the peak reaches K=20.8, with an angular separation of 0.3 mas from the central black hole, that is just at the borders of the resolution limit in the K band of incoming astronomical instruments.

10 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (9)

• Monitoring stellar orbits around the Massive Black Hole in the Galactic Center
• An X-ray, IR, and Submillimeter Flare of Sagittarius A*
• A comparison of approximate gravitational lens equations and a proposal for an improved new one
• Simultaneous Chandra, CSO and VLA Observations of Sgr A*: The Nature of Flaring Activity
• Prospects for testing the nature of Sgr A*'s NIR flares on the basis of current VLT- and future VLTI-observations
• Simultaneous NIR/sub-mm observation of flare emission from SgrA*
• GRAVITY: getting to the event horizon of Sgr A*
• Optical caustics of Kerr spacetime: the full structure
• Primary caustics and critical points behind a Kerr black hole

Cited by in corpus (21)

• Gravitational Lensing by Black Holes
• Sgr A* and General Relativity
• Testing the No-Hair Theorem with Observations of Black Holes in the Electromagnetic Spectrum
• What is limiting near-infrared astrometry in the Galactic Center?
• Relativistic Images in Randall-Sundrum II Braneworld Lensing
• Constraining the electric charges of some astronomical bodies in Reissner-Nordstrom spacetimes and generic r^-2-type power-law potentials from orbital motions
• Lensing By Sgr A* as a Probe of Modified Gravity
• Towards relativistic orbit fitting of Galactic center stars and pulsars
• Observing gravitational lensing effects by Sgr A* with GRAVITY
• Testing the No-Hair Theorem with Observations of Black Holes in the Electromagnetic Spectrum
• Wave Propagation and Quasinormal Mode Excitation on Schwarzschild Spacetime
• Estimating the parameters of the Sgr A* black hole
• Strong Gravitational Lensing by Sgr A*
• Clocks around Sgr A*
• Pulsar timing in extreme mass ratio binaries: a general relativistic approach
• Astrophysics of Bertrand Space-times
• Anisotropic quark stars in $f(R,L_m,T)$ gravity
• An Effective Model for the Quantum Schwarzschild Black Hole: Weak Deflection Angle, Quasinormal Modes and Bounding of Greybody Factor
• Electromagnetic signatures of strong-field gravity from accreting black holes
• Stars lensed by the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way: predictions for ELT, TMT, GMT, and JWST
• Gravitational lensing by a black hole in Poincar{é} gauge theory of gravity