Shadows near supermassive black holes: from a theoretical concept to GR test

Abstract

General relativity (GR) passed many astronomical tests but in majority of them GR predictions have been tested in a weak gravitational field approximation. Around 50 years ago a shadow has been introduced by J. Bardeen as a purely theoretical concept but due to an enormous progress in observational and computational facilities this theoretical prediction has been confirmed and the most solid argument for an existence of supermassive black holes in Sgr A* and M87* has been obtained.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, presented as a talk at The 6th International Conference on Particle Physics and Astrophysics (ICPPA-2022), accepted in IJMP