Shadows of rotating wormholes

Abstract

We study shadows cast by a certain class of rotating wormholes and point out the crucial role of a rotating wormhole throat in the formation of a shadow. Overlooking this crucial role of a wormhole throat has resulted incomplete results in the previous studies on shadows of the same class of rotating wormholes. We explore the dependence of the shadows on the spin of the wormholes. We compare our results with that of the Kerr black hole. With increasing values of the spin, the shapes of the wormhole shadows start deviating considerably from that of the black hole. Such considerable deviation, if detected in future observations, may possibly indicate the presence of a wormhole. In other words, the results obtained here indicate that, through the observations of their shadows, the wormholes which are considered in this work and have reasonable spin, can be distinguished from a black hole.