RESUMEN
The 2017 Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations of the central source in M87 have led to the first measurement of the size of a black-hole shadow. This observation offers a new and clean gravitational test of the black-hole metric in the strong-field regime. We show analytically that spacetimes that deviate from the Kerr metric but satisfy weak-field tests can lead to large deviations in the predicted black-hole shadows that are inconsistent with even the current EHT measurements. We use numerical calculations of regular, parametric, non-Kerr metrics to identify the common characteristic among these different parametrizations that control the predicted shadow size. We show that the shadow-size measurements place significant constraints on deviation parameters that control the second post-Newtonian and higher orders of each metric and are, therefore, inaccessible to weak-field tests. The new constraints are complementary to those imposed by observations of gravitational waves from stellar-mass sources.
RESUMEN
The formation of gaseous giant planets is thought to occur in the first few million years after stellar birth. Models predict that the process produces a deep gap in the dust component (shallower in the gas). Infrared observations of the disk around the young star HD 142527 (at a distance of about 140 parsecs from Earth) found an inner disk about 10 astronomical units (AU) in radius (1 AU is the Earth-Sun distance), surrounded by a particularly large gap and a disrupted outer disk beyond 140 AU. This disruption is indicative of a perturbing planetary-mass body at about 90 AU. Radio observations indicate that the bulk mass is molecular and lies in the outer disk, whose continuum emission has a horseshoe morphology. The high stellar accretion rate would deplete the inner disk in less than one year, and to sustain the observed accretion matter must therefore flow from the outer disk and cross the gap. In dynamical models, the putative protoplanets channel outer-disk material into gap-crossing bridges that feed stellar accretion through the inner disk. Here we report observations of diffuse CO gas inside the gap, with denser HCO(+) gas along gap-crossing filaments. The estimated flow rate of the gas is in the range of 7 × 10(-9) to 2 × 10(-7) solar masses per year, which is sufficient to maintain accretion onto the star at the present rate.
