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How to tell an accreting boson star from a black hole

Olivares, H; Younsi, Z; Fromm, CM; De Laurentis, M; Porth, O; Mizuno, Y; Falcke, H; ... Rezzolla, L; + view all (2020) How to tell an accreting boson star from a black hole. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , 497 (1) pp. 521-535. 10.1093/mnras/staa1878. Green open access

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Abstract

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.

Type: Article
Title: How to tell an accreting boson star from a black hole
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa1878
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staa1878
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: Accretion, accretion discs, black hole physics, gravitation, methods: numerical
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Space and Climate Physics
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10112389
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