Toward a realistic test of black-hole movie correlations as a probe of extreme lensing

Abstract

In an optically thin setting, gravitational lensing around a black hole creates multiple delayed images of any localized source, appearing at different positions on the observer's screen. Even if particular sources cannot be singled out, this effect may be revealed in a black-hole movie (time-dependent image) by examining the two-point spatiotemporal correlation function of intensity fluctuations in the movie. Recently, the correlation function derived from a movie obtained by ray tracing of a general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulation demonstrated the plausibility of this idea, even when the movie was blurred to angular resolutions corresponding to next-generation terrestrial very-long-baseline interferometric arrays. In this work, we further develop this method and study how some possible corruptions of the movie, motivated by real observational limitations, affect the ability to identify the extreme-lensing signatures by correlations. The effects are compared for both the original and blurred movies. We discuss the implications of our analysis for upcoming observations of M87* and Sgr A*, the two main targets of the Event Horizon Telescope and its future extensions. Our case study suggests that the types of data corruption we have explored, in themselves, do not preclude an identification of extreme-lensing effects in correlation measurements. We use our results to roughly estimate that, most importantly, for a successful correlation measurement, M87* may need to be continuously monitored for $\gtrsim 2$ years, while Sgr A* may need to be measured at a cadence $\gtrsim 1$ frame per minute. Finally, we outline a new analysis method that reduces the data in the complete correlation function---a large dataset defined on a five-dimensional configuration space---to a two-dimensional histogram that could be useful for black-hole parameter inference.