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arXiv · 2509.08728

SMBH shadows: gravity fingerprints revealed by spectral line background radiation

Konstantinos Kostaros·Padelis Papadopoulos·Wing-Fai Thi·George Pappas
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Abstract

SMBHs at the centers of galaxies, illuminated by their accretion disks, can reveal valuable information on BH spacetimes via their shadows, which can be used for strong-gravity tests. However, the continuum emission from their highly turbulent hot plasma is expected to be strongly time-varying and with very inhomogeneous brightness. This can mask important SMBH-related effects, like the appearance of the light-ring, rendering them ineffective as probes of strong gravitational lensing physics. Besides being an inhomogeneous and strongly time-varying ''illuminator'', the hot plasma emission extends all the way to the ISCO. This then leads to the superposition of the strongly-lensed radiation from the area of the light-ring to the continuum emission from the ISCO, effectively making gravitational lensing physics hard to separate from accretion disk Astrophysics. These problems could be overcome if one utilizes the spectral line radiation field emanating from the cooler parts of the extended accretion disk, the so-called BLR, and especially its expected neutral phase, as a more distant, but still adequately strong SMBH illuminator, typically found at $r\sim (10^2-10^4)\, R_s$. This kind of illumination can provide a cleaner image of the light-ring region, and thus allow more information on the spacetime geometry around the SMBH to be obtained. Here, we examine some of the benefits of such an illumination in discerning strong-gravity physics near SMBHs and their observability. We expand on the fact that such emission can provide a smoking gun signal of lensing, in the form of an Einstein ring. To first order, the imaging of the Einstein ring and its spectroscopic signature can facilitate the measurement of the SMBH mass, while the second order effects associated with the light-ring can constrain the SMBH spin, and even identify deviations from the Kerr spacetime.

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BibTeXRIS

Konstantinos Kostaros, Padelis Papadopoulos, Wing-Fai Thi, George Pappas. 2025-09-10. SMBH shadows: gravity fingerprints revealed by spectral line background radiation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08728

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