Shadows and strong gravitational lensing: a brief review

Abstract

For ultra compact objects, light rings and fundamental photon orbits (FPOs) play a pivotal role in the theoretical analysis of strong gravitational lensing effects, and of BH shadows in particular. In this short review, specific models are considered to illustrate how FPOs can be useful in order to understand some non-trivial gravitational lensing effects. This paper aims at briefly overviewing the theoretical foundations of these effects, touching also some of the related phenomenology, both in general relativity and alternative theories of gravity, hopefully providing some intuition and new insights for the underlying physics, which might be critical when testing the Kerr black hole hypothesis.