NUT charges and black hole shadows

Abstract

We study the nontrivial effects of the NUT charges on the shadows of the Kerr-Taub-NUT black holes seen by zero-angular-momentum-observers. Inclination angles with which the observers gain maximal, locally extreme or minimal shadow sizes and distortions are investigated for the black holes with different NUT charges and distributions of string singularities. Typically, we discover that when the observer approaches the string singularity, the shadow size can be relatively very small while the shadow distortion being relatively quite large. And exceptionally, we find that when the string singularity locates only at the south pole axis of the black hole with large enough NUT charge, the shadow size is maximal for a north pole observer.