TL;DR
This paper demonstrates how Event Horizon Telescope observations of M87's supermassive black hole can place model-independent constraints on deviations from General Relativity, particularly on the reflection properties near the horizon, limiting possible alternative compact objects.
Contribution
It introduces a method to constrain deviations from GR using EHT data by focusing on reflection coefficients, applicable to a broad class of alternative theories of black holes.
Findings
Reflection coefficients constrained to be less than ~10%.
Constraints imply deviation length scales less than ~100 micrometers.
Some black-hole echo models are ruled out by these bounds.
Abstract
We show how Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations of the supermassive object at the center of M87 can constrain deviations from General Relativity (GR) in a relatively model-independent way. We focus on the class of theories whose deviations from GR modify black holes into alternative compact objects whose properties approach those of an ordinary black hole sufficiently far from the would-be event horizon. We examine this class for two reasons: () they tend to reproduce black-hole expectations for astrophysical accretion disks (and so do not undermine the evidence linking black holes to active galactic nuclei); () they lend themselves to a robust effective-field-theory treatment that expands in powers of , where is the fundamental length scale that sets the distance over which deviations from GR are significant and is a measure of distance from the…
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