Black hole photon ring beyond General Relativity: an integrable parametrization

TL;DR

This paper develops an integrable parametrization of deviations from Kerr black holes, analyzes photon ring shapes, and demonstrates degeneracies in distinguishing Kerr from non-Kerr geometries, impacting future black hole tests.

Contribution

Introduces the Kerr off shell (KOS) parametrization preserving key symmetries, and derives a closed-form formula for the photon ring critical curve considering deviations from Kerr.

Findings

The circlipse shape fitting function shows high degeneracy between Kerr and non-Kerr black holes.

Degeneracy can be broken if black hole mass and spin are measured independently.

Analytic expressions for photon trajectories enable precise modeling of photon rings.

Abstract

In recent years, the shape of the photon ring in black holes images has been argued to provide a sharp test of the Kerr hypothesis for future black hole imaging missions. In this work, we confront this proposal to beyond Kerr geometries and investigate the degeneracy in the estimations of the black hole parameters using the circlipse shape proposed by Gralla and Lupsasca. To that end, we consider a model-independent parametrization of the deviations to the Kerr black hole geometry, dubbed Kerr off shell (KOS), which preserves the fundamental symmetry structure of Kerr known as the Killing tower. Besides exhibiting a Killing tensor and thus a Carter-like constant, all the representants of this family also possess a Killing-Yano tensor and are of Petrov type D. The allowed deviations to Kerr, selected by the symmetry, are encoded in two free functions which depend respectively on the radial and polar angle coordinates. Using the symmetries, we provide an analytic study of the radial and polar motion of photon trajectories generating the critical curve, to which the subrings composing the photon ring converge. This allows us to derive a ready-to-use closed formula for the parametric critical curve in term of the free functions parametrizing the deviations to Kerr. Using this result, we confront the circlipse fitting function to four examples of Kerr-like objects and we show that it admits a high degree of degeneracy. At a given inclination, the same circlipse can fit both a Kerr black hole of a given mass and spin $(M,a)$ or a modified rotating black hole with different mass and spin parameters $(M,a)$ and a new parameter $\alpha$. Therefore, future tests of the Kerr hypothesis could be achieved only provided one can measure independently the mass and spin of the black hole to break this degeneracy.