An Illustrated History of Black Hole Imaging : Personal Recollections (1972-2002)

Abstract

The Event Horizon Telescope Consortium is on the verge to provide the first telescopic image of massive black holes SgrA* and M87* surrounded by accretion disks, at a resolution scale comparable to the size of their event horizons. Well before this remarkable achievement made possible by VLBI radio astronomy, many researchers used the computer to reconstruct how a black hole surrounded by luminous material would look from close-up views. The images must experience extraordinary optical deformations due to the deflection of light rays produced by the strong curvature of the space-time in the vicinity. General relativity allows the calculation of such effects, both on a surrounding accretion disk and on the background star field. This article is an exhaustive and illustrated review of the numerical work on black hole imaging done during the first thirty years of its history.

26 pages, 23 figures. Higher resolution format available on demand

References in corpus (7)

• Event-horizon-scale structure in the supermassive black hole candidate at the Galactic Centre
• Jet Launching Structure Resolved Near the Supermassive Black Hole in M87
• The old nuclear star cluster in the Milky Way: dynamics, mass, statistical parallax, and black hole mass
• Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar
• Seeing the unseeable
• Imaging black holes: past, present and future
• Falling into a black hole

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Nonlinear electrodynamics effects on the black hole shadow, deflection angle, quasinormal modes and greybody factors
• Near-horizon geodesics of high-spin black holes
• A proof-of-concept neural network for inferring parameters of a black hole from partial interferometric images of its shadow
• Real-time High-Quality Rendering of Non-Rotating Black Holes
• Visible shapes of black holes M87* and SgrA*