Photon ring and observational appearance of a hairy black hole

Recently, the image of a Schwarzschild black hole with an accretion disk has been revisited, and it showed that the photon ring, defined as highly bent light rays that intersect the disk plane more than twice, is extremely narrow and makes a negligible contribution to the total brightness. In this paper, we investigate the observational appearance of an optically and geometrically thin accretion disk around a hairy black hole in an Einstein-Maxwell-scalar model. Intriguingly, we find that in a certain parameter regime, due to an extra maximum or an anklelike structure in the effective potential for photons, the photon ring can be remarkably wide, thus making a notable contribution to the flux of the observed image. In particular, there appears a wide and bright annulus, which comprises multiple concentric bright thin rings with different luminosity, in the high resolution image.

Automated summary

Recent studies have shown that under certain conditions, the photon ring surrounding a hairy black hole can be remarkably wide and make a notable contribution to the observed image, forming a bright annulus structure.