Horizon-scale images of black holes (BHs) and their shadows have opened an unprecedented window onto tests of gravity and fundamental physics in the strong-field regime, allowing us to test whether the Kerr metric provides a good description of the space-time in the vicinity of the event horizons of supermassive BHs. We consider a wide range of well-motivated deviations from classical General Relativity solutions, and constrain them using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations of Sagittarius A * (SgrA * ), connecting the size of the bright ring of emission to that of the underlying BH shadow and exploiting high-precision measurements of SgrA * 's mass-to-distance ratio. The scenarios we consider, and whose fundamental parameters we constrain, include various regular BH models, string-and non-linear electrodynamics-inspired space-times, scalar field-driven violations of the no-hair theorem, alternative theories of gravity, new ingredients such as the generalized uncertainty principle and Barrow entropy, and BH mimickers including examples of wormholes and naked singularities. We demonstrate that SgrA * 's image places particularly stringent constraints on models predicting a shadow size which is larger than that of a Schwarzschild BH of a given mass: for instance, in the case of Barrow entropy we derive constraints which are significantly tighter than the cosmological ones. Our results are among the first tests of fundamental physics from the shadow of SgrA * and, while the latter appears to be in excellent agreement with the predictions of General Relativity, we have shown that various well-motivated alternative scenarios (including BH mimickers) are far from being ruled out at present.

Horizon-scale images of black holes (BHs) and their shadows have opened an unprecedented window onto tests of gravity and fundamental physics in the strong-field regime. We consider a wide range of well-motivated deviations from classical General Relativity (GR) BH solutions, and constrain them using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), connecting the size of the bright ring of emission to that of the underlying BH shadow and exploiting high-precision measurements of Sgr A*’s mass-to-distance ratio. The scenarios we consider, and whose fundamental parameters we constrain, include various regular BHs, string-inspired space-times, violations of the no-hair theorem driven by additional fields, alternative theories of gravity, novel fundamental physics frameworks, and BH mimickers including well-motivated wormhole and naked singularity space-times. We demonstrate that the EHT image of Sgr A* places particularly stringent constraints on models predicting a shadow size larger than that of a Schwarzschild BH of a given mass, with the resulting limits in some cases surpassing cosmological ones. Our results are among the first tests of fundamental physics from the shadow of Sgr A* and, while the latter appears to be in excellent agreement with the predictions of GR, we have shown that a number of well-motivated alternative scenarios, including BH mimickers, are far from being ruled out at present.

The possible occurence of ultralight boson clouds around Kerr black holes has attracted a lot of interest. In this work, we determine the signatures of boson cloud evolution in the shadow of a black hole. We assess the detectability of such variations in current and future imaging techniques of black hole shadow observations. We look at several black hole candidates, both intragalactic and extragalactic, and suggest SgrA * as an optimal candidate for observation of such signatures. Thus black hole shadow observations could be instrumental in searching for ultralight bosons or axion like particles.

We find the low lying quasinormal mode frequencies of the recently proposed novel four dimensional Gauss–Bonnet de Sitter black holes for scalar, electromagnetic and Dirac field perturbations using the third order WKB approximation as well as Padé approximation, as an improvement over WKB. We figure out the effect of the Gauss–Bonnet coupling $$\alpha $$α and the cosmological constant $$\Lambda $$Λ on the real and imaginary parts of the QNM frequencies. We also study the greybody factors and eikonal limits in the above background for all three different types of perturbations.

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