Distinguishing a Slowly Accelerating Black Hole by Differential Time Delays of Images

Abstract

Accelerating supermassive black holes, connected to cosmic strings, could contribute to structure formation and get captured by galaxies if their velocities are small. This would mean that the acceleration of these black holes is small too. Such a slow acceleration has no significant effect on the shadow of such supermassive black holes. We also show that, for slowly accelerating black holes, the angular position of images in the gravitational lensing effects do not change significantly. We propose a method to observe the acceleration of these black holes through the gravitational lensing. The method is based on the observation that differential time delays associated with the images are substantially different with respect to the case of non-accelerating black holes.

Comments: 5 pages, 3 figures, matched the published version in PRL. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2110.13132