Multiple rings in the shadow of extremely compact objects

The Event Horizon Telescope’s image of the M87 black hole provides an exciting opportunity to study black hole physics. Since a black hole’s event horizon absorbs all electromagnetic waves, it is difficult to actively probe the horizon’s existence. However, with the help of a family of extremely compact, horizon-less objects, named “gravastars”, whose external spacetimes are nearly identical to those of black holes, one can test the absence of event horizons: absences of additional features that arise due to the existence of the gravastar, or its surface, can be used as quantitative evidence for black holes. We apply Gralla et al. approach of studying black hole images to study the images of two types of gravastars: transparent ones and reflective ones. In both cases, the transmission of rays through gravastars, or their reflections on their surfaces, leads to more rings in their images. For simple emission models, where the redshifted emissivity of the disk is peaked at a particular radius [Formula: see text], the position of a series of rings can be related in a simple manner to light ray propagation: a ring shows up around impact parameter [Formula: see text] whenever rays incident from infinity at [Formula: see text] intersects the disk at [Formula: see text]. We show that additional rings will appear in the images of transparent and reflective gravastars. In particular, one of the additional rings for the reflective gravastar is due to the prompt reflection of light on the gravastar surface, and appears to be well separated from the others. This can be an intuitive feature, which may be reliably used to constrain the reflectivity of the black hole’s horizon.