Shadow and weak deflection angle of a black hole in nonlocal gravity

TL;DR

This paper investigates how nonlocal gravity affects black hole shadows and gravitational lensing, revealing that nonlocality alters shadow size, shape, and light deflection, with potential implications for testing quantum gravity effects.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of nonlocal gravity effects on rotating black hole shadows and lensing, including plasma influence and energy emission characteristics.

Findings

Shadow size decreases with the cut-off parameter.

Shadow shape becomes more deformed as nonlocality increases.

Energy emission peaks shift to lower frequencies with higher nonlocality.

Abstract

Black hole shadow and gravitational lensing play important roles in testing gravitational theories in the strong field regime. As the first-order modifications from quantum gravity, the nonlocality can be manifested by black hole shadow and gravitational lensing. For example, the cut-off parameter introduced by nonlocality will affect the shape and size of the black hole shadow, and also affect the deflection angle of light rays. In this paper, we mainly investigate the effects of the nonlocality on the black hole shadow and the gravitational lensing for two types of rotating black holes in nonlocal gravity. It is found that the size of the black hole shadow decreases with the cut-off parameter since the nonlocality weakens the gravitational constant, and the shape of the shadow gets more deformed with the increase of the cut-off parameter. However, if the rotation parameter is small, the shape of the shadow is almost a circle even though the cut-off parameter approaches its maximum. The energy emission rate in both models is also studied. The results show that there is a peak for each curve and the peak decreases and shifts to the low frequency with the increase of the cut-off parameter. Besides, we also explore the shadow of both types of black holes surrounded by a nonmagnetized pressureless plasma which satisfies the separability condition. It is found that the plasma has a frequency-dependent dispersive effect on the size and shape of the black hole shadow. For the gravitational lensing, we find that the cut-off parameter of model A makes a positive contribution to the deflection angle, which can be compared with the contribution of the rotation parameter, while the cut-off parameter of model B makes a negative contribution which can be ignored. These results may be helpful for probing nonlocal gravity in future observations.