accreting supermassive black hole tagged posts

Can we tell black holes apart? Astrophysicists at Goethe University Frankfurt answer this question by computing images of feeding non-Einsteinian black holes: at present it is hard to tell them apart from standard black holes. Credit: Fromm/Younsi/Mizuno/Rezzolla (Frankfurt)

Astrophysicists have created and compared self-consistent and realistic images of the shadow of an accreting supermassive black hole. The goal was to test if Einsteinian black holes can be distinguished from those in alternative theories of gravity. One of the most fundamental predictions of Einstein’s theory of relativity is the existence of black holes...