Concerns regarding the use of black hole shadows as standard rulers

Abstract

Recently, Tsupko et al. have put forward the very interesting proposal to use the shadows of high-redshift supermassive black holes (SMBHs) as standard rulers. This would in principle allow us to probe the expansion history within a redshift range which would otherwise be challenging to access. In this note, we critically examine this proposal, and identify a number of important issues which had been previously overlooked. These include difficulties in obtaining reliable SMBH mass estimates and reaching the required angular resolution, and an insufficient knowledge of the accretion dynamics of high-redshift SMBHs. While these issues currently appear to prevent high-redshift SMBH shadows from being used as robust standard rulers, we hope that our flagging them early will help in making this probe theoretically mature by the time it will be experimentally feasible.

12 pages, 1 figure. Added references and improved discussion on weak lensing. Version accepted for publication in Class. Quant. Grav

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