The Event Horizon Telescope image of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 is dominated by a bright, unresolved ring. General relativity predicts that embedded within this image lies a thin "photon ring," which is composed of an infinite sequence of self-similar subrings that are indexed by the number of photon orbits around the black hole. The subrings approach the edge of the black hole "shadow," becoming exponentially narrower but weaker with increasing orbit number, with seemingly negligible contributions from high order subrings. Here, we show that these subrings produce strong and universal signatures on long interferometric baselines. These signatures offer the possibility of precise measurements of black hole mass and spin, as well as tests of general relativity, using only a sparse interferometric array.

Massive objects orbiting a near-extreme Kerr black hole quickly plunge into the horizon after passing the innermost stable circular orbit. The plunge trajectory is shown to be related by a conformal map to a circular orbit. Conformal symmetry of the near-horizon region is then used to compute the gravitational radiation produced during the plunge phase.the near-NHEK geometry [10] is obtained by scaling r ∼ κ to zero: PHYSICAL REVIEW D 90, 064045 (2014) 1550-7998=2014=90(6)=064045 (11) 064045-1

The negative mode of the Schwarzschild black hole is central to Euclidean quantum gravity around hot flat space and for the Gregory-Laflamme black string instability. We analyze the eigenvalue as a function of space-time dimension λ = λ(d) by constructing two perturbative expansions: one for large d and the other for small d − 3, and determining as many coefficients as we are able to compute analytically. Joining the two expansions we obtain an interpolating rational function accurate to better than 2% through the whole range of dimensions including d = 4.

Most extreme-mass-ratio-inspirals of small compact objects into supermassive black holes end with a fast plunge from an eccentric last stable orbit. For rapidly rotating black holes such fast plunges may be studied in the context of the Kerr/CFT correspondence because they occur in the near-horizon region where dynamics are governed by the infinite dimensional conformal symmetry. In this paper we use conformal transformations to analytically solve for the radiation emitted from fast plunges into near-extreme Kerr black holes. We find perfect agreement between the gravity and CFT computations.