Saturday, 6 February 2010

Does gravitational lensing cause a black-hole to be the main 'source' of light in a given area?

So the question is, Can black holes be really be extraordinarily bright due to lensing of background objects?



Let's first also specify that these black holes must certainly be super massive. If not, we're talking about stellar mass black holes (or intermediate mass black holes), and the lensing signal would be much weaker. More mass = more lensing generally speaking (there are some exceptions, e.g. - microlensing, where the lensing is done by stars in our own Milky Way galaxy and the signal is enhanced because the source and lens are aligned nearly perfectly).



This is an important statement to make because virtually every galaxy has been identified with a super massive black hole at its center. The reverse is also true - every super massive black hole is associated with a galaxy. It's also important to note that, realistically speaking, galaxies have total masses of about $sim10^{11} - 10^{12} M_{odot}$, whereas super massive black holes typically have masses of millions to hundreds of millions (maybe even billions) of solar masses. This is a smallish fraction of the total mass. This means that most of the lensing will be done by the galactic halo and not the super massive black hole.



If we modeled the center of the lens galaxy as a point-lens, and the galactic halo as a singular isothermal sphere, the relevant question I would ask is what are their Einstein radii (which is a measure of how effective or efficient they are at lensing) individually, and what are they in combination? Essentially, how much does the existence of a central super massive black hole matter to the system as a whole. Strong lensing features (arcs, rings, or multiple images) generally occur at around the Einstein radius of the object.



My best guess:



Quite honestly I don't see the central super massive black hole mattering all that much when it comes to lensing. Many of these mass profile models for the lens galaxy halo are singular, or rise very rapidly to a central core. Furthermore, I've never really heard of a situation where a lone super massive black hole (not associated with a galaxy - call it a 'rogue' smbh if you will) has been found floating around in space to do this sort of lensing. They generally hide at the centers of galaxies, or show themselves only if they're actively accreting material. Correct me if one has been found (maybe it would come from a merging of two smbh's where one is kicked out of the system).

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