A couple of months ago, I came across a nice paper, by Verma and Silk (of Silk damping fame, as he’s known to cosmologists), showing what would happen if we had a chance to view the “shadow” of a supermassive black hole as it is microlensed by an intervening smaller black hole along the line-of-sight.
It occurred to me that I have the means to model this. At first I thought I’d write a short paper. But there really is nothing new that I can add to what Verma and Silk said in their paper, other than a nice animation produced by my ray tracing code.
So here it is. A brief animation of a small black hole passing in front of the famous “shadow”.
Things are not exactly to scale, of course, but for what it’s worth, this video corresponds roughly to a 10,000 solar mass black hole passing through, halfway between us and Sagittarius A*.