Extreme lensing signatures revealed by correlations of simulated black hole movies

A black hole’s gravitational pull can deflect light rays to an arbitrary degree. As a result, any source fluctuation near the black hole creates multiple lagged images on an observer’s screen. For optically thin stochastic emission, these light echoes give rise to correlations of brightness fluctuations across time-dependent images (movies). The correlation pattern disentangles source-specific characteristics from universal features dictated by general relativity. This picture has motivated a proposal to use the two-point image correlation function as a probe of extreme gravitational lensing in upcoming black hole imaging campaigns. Here we test the feasibility of this method by computing the two-point correlation function of brightness fluctuations in a black hole movie of state-of-the-art realism. The movie is generated by ray tracing a general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulation, which can then be blurred to any angular resolution. At the effective resolution expected to be achieved by next-generation terrestrial very-long-baseline interferometric arrays, these lensing signatures appear in neither time-averaged images nor light-curve autocorrelations. However, we demonstrate that they are clearly visible in the more fine-grained two-point image correlation function. Our positive findings motivate a more comprehensive investigation into the instrument specifications and inference techniques needed to resolve extreme lensing effects through correlations.