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

Abstract

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. We also study the minimal criteria for detecting and resolving such shadows with very-long-baseline-interferometric observations. We find that one would need telescopes capable of resolving apparent magnitudes greater than $33$ with baselines larger than $10^6$ km. Therefore, although very-long-baseline-interferometric efforts such as the Event Horizon Telescope would not be able to detect these shadows, their detection is possible with future telescopes in the next few decades.

24 pages, 5 Figures, 2 Tables. Videos included in supplemental material. Submitted to CQG

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Cited by in corpus (19)

• Calculating black hole shadows: Review of analytical studies
• Parameter estimation of hairy Kerr black holes from its shadow and constraints from M87*
• Black hole shadow in a general rotating spacetime obtained through Newman-Janis algorithm
• Black hole mimicker hiding in the shadow: Optical properties of the $\gamma$-metric
• Rotating regular black holes in conformal massive gravity
• Public Release of RELXILL_NK: A Relativistic Reflection Model for Testing Einstein's Gravity
• Black hole shadow as a standard ruler in cosmology
• Testing the Kerr black hole hypothesis using X-ray reflection spectroscopy and a thin disk model with finite thickness
• First analytical calculation of black hole shadow in McVittie metric
• Testing Gravity with Black Hole Shadow Subrings
• Testing regular black holes with X-ray and GW data
• Reflection spectra of accretion disks illuminated by disk-like coronae
• On the properties of a deformed extension of the NUT space-time
• Parameter estimation of Kerr-Bertotti-Robinson black holes using their shadows
• Shadows and parameter estimation of rotating quantum corrected black holes and constraints from EHT observation of M87* and Sgr A*
• Remarks on the light ring images and the optical appearance of hairy black holes in Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton gravity
• Observational appearance of Kaluza-Klein black holes
• GALLIFRAY -- A geometric modeling and parameter estimation framework for black hole images using bayesian techniques
• Microlensing Black Hole Shadows