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Shadows and strong gravitational lensing: a brief review

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Abstract

For ultra compact objects, light rings and fundamental photon orbits (FPOs) play a pivotal role in the theoretical analysis of strong gravitational lensing effects, and of BH shadows in particular. In this short review, specific models are considered to illustrate how FPOs can be useful in order to understand some non-trivial gravitational lensing effects. This paper aims at briefly overviewing the theoretical foundations of these effects, touching also some of the related phenomenology, both in general relativity and alternative theories of gravity, hopefully providing some intuition and new insights for the underlying physics, which might be critical when testing the Kerr black hole hypothesis.

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Notes

  1. Unless stated otherwise, the LRs under consideration are non-degenerate. See [39] for a discussion of the degenerate case.

  2. The mass of the central BH can be determined via Komar integrals.

  3. A comparable Kerr BH has the same ADM mass and angular momentum.

  4. Stable FPOs can also contribute to the lensing despite not producing a sharp signature.

  5. The stable LR does not have such a clear lensing signature.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank E. Berti, J. Grover, E. Radu, H. Rúnarsson, A. Wittig for collaboration on some of the work reviewed in this paper. We would also like to thank all the participants in the Gravitational lensing and black hole shadows workshop that took place in Aveiro, Portugal, in November 2016, for many stimulating discussions on these topics. P.C. is supported by Grant No. PD/BD/114071/2015 under the FCT-IDPASC Portugal Ph.D. program. C.H. acknowledges funding from the FCT-IF programme. This work was partially supported by the H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 Grant No. StronGrHEP-690904, the H2020-MSCA-RISE-2017 Grant No. FunFiCO-777740 and by the CIDMA Project UID/MAT/04106/2013 The authors would like to acknowledge networking support by the COST Action CA16104.

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  1. Departamento de Física, Universidade de Aveiro and CIDMA, Campus de Santiago, 3810-183, Aveiro, Portugal

    Pedro V. P. Cunha & Carlos A. R. Herdeiro

  2. Centro de Astrofísica e Gravitação - CENTRA, Departamento de Física, Instituto Superior Técnico - IST, Universidade de Lisboa - UL, Av. Rovisco Pais 1, 1049-001, Lisboa, Portugal

    Pedro V. P. Cunha

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  1. Pedro V. P. Cunha
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Correspondence to Pedro V. P. Cunha.

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This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Testing the Kerr spacetime with gravitational-wave and electromagnetic observations.

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Cunha, P.V.P., Herdeiro, C.A.R. Shadows and strong gravitational lensing: a brief review. Gen Relativ Gravit 50, 42 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10714-018-2361-9

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