14 May 2021

Accretion disk and relativistic astrophysics meeting

Location: ZARM Bremen - Online
When: 14.5.2021, 14:00 CET

Speaker: Dr. Hector Olivares (Radboud University Nijmegen)

Title: Seeing black hole shadows through the plasma clouds

Abstract: Very-long baseline interferometric observations of black hole shadows at event-horizon-scale resolution can provide extremely valuable information on the nature of supermassive black hole candidates and a means to constrain theories of gravity. However, our ability to extract such information heavily relies on an adequate understanding of the properties of the environment that surrounds these objects. In this talk we will discuss how the properties of the accretion flow can modify the observed size of a black hole shadow to the extent of producing apparent shadows for some objects that are not black holes, and whether the conditions that allow for reliable measurements of the shadow size are met in the leading models of low-luminosity active galactic nuclei.