Black hole shadow in an expanding universe with a cosmological constant

Abstract

We analytically investigate the influence of a cosmic expansion on the shadow of the Schwarzschild black hole. We suppose that the expansion is driven by a cosmological constant only and use the Kottler (or Schwarzschild-deSitter) spacetime as a model for a Schwarzschild black hole embedded in a deSitter universe. We calculate the angular radius of the shadow for an observer who is comoving with the cosmic expansion. It is found that the angular radius of the shadow shrinks to a non-zero finite value if the comoving observer approaches infinity.