Lensing Signatures of a Slowly-Accelerated Black Hole

Abstract

Accelerating black holes, connected to cosmic strings could evolve to supermassive black holes. However, if they are going to take part in structure formation and resides at the center of galaxies, their acceleration should be small. This slow acceleration does not change the shadow or image position in gravitational lensing effect significantly. However we show that the time delay associated to these images change significantly. This is in contrast with when the theory governing the strong gravitational field around the black hole is different from general relativity, where not only the differential time delays but the angular position of images would be different. We conclude that, if the observed angular position of images are compatible with the prediction of general relativity, a possible deviation in the differential time delays between the observed values and those predicted by general relativity, could be due to the acceleration of the black hole.