Schedule Sep 01, 2020
Event Horizon Telescope
Dimitrios Psaltis, Arizona
Cite as: doi:10.26081/K6W31B

The imaging of black-hole shadows with the Event Horizon Telescope has opened a new window into the strong-field spacetimes of these extreme astrophysical objects. For the Kerr spacetime, the shadow of a black hole is nearly circular with a size that depends almost entirely on its mass. I will discuss first the astrophysics of shadow formation in the images of black holes and the properties of the EHT data that allow us to perform null-hypothesis tests of General Relativity. I will discuss metrics that deviate from Kerr and their signatures related to the shapes and sizes of black-hole shadows. I will conclude with a prognosis on what ground-based observations of shadows can tell us about black-hole metrics and the underlying theory of gravity.


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