Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 497, Issue 1, Pages 521-535Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa1878
Keywords
accretion, accretion discs; black hole physics; gravitation; methods: numerical
Categories
Funding
- ERC Synergy Grant 'BlackHoleCam - Imaging the EventHorizon of Black Holes' [610058]
- LOEWE-Program in HIC for FAIR
- CONACYT-DAAD scholarship
- Virtual Institute of Accretion (VIA) postdoctoral fellowship from the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA)
- Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship
- Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
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The capability of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) to image the nearest supermassive black hole candidates at horizon-scale resolutions offers a novel means to study gravity in its strongest regimes and to test different models for these objects. Here, we study the observational appearance at 230 GHz of a surfaceless black hole mimicker, namely a non-rotating boson star, in a scenario consistent with the properties of the accretion flow on to Sgr A*. To this end, we perform general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations followed by general relativistic radiative transfer calculations in the boson star space-time. Synthetic reconstructed images considering realistic astronomical observing conditions show that, despite qualitative similarities, the differences in the appearance of a black hole - either rotating or not - and a boson star of the type considered here are large enough to be detectable. These differences arise from dynamical effects directly related to the absence of an event horizon, in particular, the accumulation of matter in the form of a small torus or a spheroidal cloud in the interior of the boson star, and the absence of an evacuated high-magnetization funnel in the polar regions. The mechanism behind these effects is general enough to apply to other horizonless and surfaceless black hole mimickers, strengthening confidence in the ability of the EHT to identify such objects via radio observations.
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