Black Hole Glimmer Signatures of Mass, Spin, and Inclination
arXiv:2009.06641 · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/abdd2d
Abstract
Gravitational lensing near a black hole is strong enough that light rays can circle the event horizon multiple times. Photons emitted in multiple directions at a single event, perhaps because of localized, impulsive heating of accreting plasma, take multiple paths to a distant observer. In the Kerr geometry, each path is associated with a distinct light travel time and a distinct arrival location in the image plane, producing black hole glimmer. This sequence of arrival times and locations uniquely encodes the mass and spin of the black hole and can be understood in terms of properties of bound photon orbits. We provide a geometrically motivated treatment of Kerr glimmer and evaluate it numerically for simple hotspot models to show that glimmer can be measured in a finite-resolution observation. We discuss potential measurement methods and implications for tests of the Kerr hypothesis.
12 pages, 7 figures; added more detailed discussion of inclination; accepted to ApJ
References in corpus (16)
- First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole
- Inspiral, merger and ring-down of equal-mass black-hole binaries
- Measurement of the Kerr Spin Parameter by Observation of a Compact Object's Shadow
- Inspiral, merger and ringdown of unequal mass black hole binaries: a multipolar analysis
- Relativistic X-ray Lines from the Inner Accretion Disks Around Black Holes
- A new method for shadow calculations: application to parameterised axisymmetric black holes
- Apparent shape of super-spinning black holes
- Null geodesics and shadow of a rotating black hole in extended Chern-Simons modified gravity
- Shadow of a Kaluza-Klein rotating dilaton black hole
- The Shape of the Black Hole Photon Ring: A Precise Test of Strong-Field General Relativity
- Photon Rings around Kerr and Kerr-like Black Holes
- Quasinormal-mode spectrum of Kerr black holes and its geometric interpretation
- Lensing by Kerr Black Holes
- Reflection-asymmetric wormholes and their double shadows
- Magnetic Jets from Swirling Disks
- Black hole Spin Measurement Based on Time-domain VLBI Observations of Infalling Gas Cloud
Cited by in corpus (26)
- Key Science Goals for the Next-Generation Event Horizon Telescope
- Millimeter light curves of Sagittarius A* observed during the 2017 Event Horizon Telescope campaign
- Photon Ring Autocorrelations
- Measuring Spin from Relative Photon Ring Sizes
- Photon ring test of the Kerr hypothesis: Variation in the ring shape
- Photon rings as tests for alternative spherically symmetric geometries with thin accretion disks
- Adaptive Analytical Ray Tracing of Black Hole Photon Rings
- Photon Ring Astrometry for Superradiant Clouds
- The Black Hole Explorer: Photon Ring Science, Detection and Shape Measurement
- Polarimetric signatures of the photon ring of a black hole that is pierced by a cosmic axion string
- Polarization images of accretion flow around supermassive black holes: imprints of toroidal field structure
- The Role of Adaptive Ray Tracing in Analyzing Black Hole Structure
- Quasinormal modes in two-photon autocorrelation and the geometric-optics approximation
- Jets and Rings in Images of Spinning Black Holes
- Blacklight: A General-Relativistic Ray-Tracing and Analysis Tool
- RAIKOU: A General Relativistic, Multi-wavelength Radiative Transfer Code
- Measuring Black Hole Light Echoes with Very Long Baseline Interferometry
- Explanation for the absence of secondary peaks in black hole light curve autocorrelations
- Extreme lensing induces spectro-temporal correlations in black-hole signals
- Forward Ray Tracing and Hot Spots in Kerr Spacetime
- Prospects for ray-tracing light intensity and polarization in models of accreting compact objects using a GPU
- Auto- and cross-correlations for multiple images of corotating hotspots in accretion disks
- Exploring black holes with multiple photon spheres by interferometric signatures
- Extreme-Lensing Signatures Revealed by Correlations of Simulated Black-Hole Movies
- Decoding a black hole metric from the interferometric pattern of the relativistic images of a compact source
- PATOKA: Simulating Electromagnetic Observables of Black Hole Accretion