Black Hole Shadow Image and Visibility Analysis of Sagittarius A*

Lei Huang1,3, Mike Cai4, Zhi-Qiang Shen1,2, and Feng Yuan1,2


(1) Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200030, China,
(2) Joint Institute for Galaxy and Cosmology (JOINGC) of ShAO and USTC, Shanghai 200030, China,
(3) Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100039, China,
(4) Academia Sinica, Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Taipei, China

Paper: MNRAS accepted

Weblink: http://www.arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0703254

EPrint Server: astro-ph/0703254


Abstract:

The compact dark objects with very large masses residing at the centres of galaxies are believed to be black holes. Due to the gravitational lensing effect, they would cast a shadow larger than their horizon size over the background, whose shape and size can be calculated. For the supermassive black hole candidate Sgr A*, this shadow spans an angular size of about 50 micro arc second, which is under the resolution attainable with the current astronomical instruments. Such a shadow image of Sgr A* will be observable at about 1 mm wavelength, considering the scatter broadening by the interstellar medium. By simulating the black hole shadow image of Sgr A* with the radiatively inefficient accretion flow model, we demonstrate that analyzing the properties of the visibility function can help us determine some parameters of the black hole configuration, which is instructive to the sub-millimeter VLBI observations of Sgr A* in the near future.


Preprints available from the authors at muduri@shao.ac.cn , or the raw TeX (no figures) if you click here.

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