Shadows of rotating wormholes

TL;DR

This paper investigates the shadows of rotating wormholes, emphasizing the importance of the wormhole throat, and shows how their shadows differ from black holes as spin increases, potentially allowing observational distinction.

Contribution

It highlights the crucial role of the wormhole throat in shadow formation and provides a detailed comparison with Kerr black holes, improving previous incomplete analyses.

Findings

Wormhole shadows significantly deviate from black hole shadows with increasing spin.

The wormhole throat plays a crucial role in shadow formation.

Future observations could distinguish wormholes from black holes based on shadow differences.

Abstract

We study shadows cast by a certain class of rotating wormholes and point out the crucial role of a rotating wormhole throat in the formation of a shadow. Overlooking this crucial role of a wormhole throat has resulted incomplete results in the previous studies on shadows of the same class of rotating wormholes. We explore the dependence of the shadows on the spin of the wormholes. We compare our results with that of the Kerr black hole. With increasing values of the spin, the shapes of the wormhole shadows start deviating considerably from that of the black hole. Such considerable deviation, if detected in future observations, may possibly indicate the presence of a wormhole. In other words, the results obtained here indicate that, through the observations of their shadows, the wormholes which are considered in this work and have reasonable spin, can be distinguished from a black hole.