Analytical Approaches to Modeling Thick Photon Rings
Sergey V. Chernov · Astrophysical Bulletin · 2026
Abstract General relativity predicts the existence of an infinite number of nested photon rings around black holes, each containing information about the properties of curved space-time. In this paper, analytical models of a thick Gaussian asymmetric photon ring are developed and the visibility function with baselines up to six Earth diameters is calculated.