I’m really excited that my paper on horizon-scale tests of gravity theories and fundamental physics from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) image of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) has been accepted for publication in CQG! This is a huge paper I led with 14 other authors spread throughout the world (our countries of affiliation include Italy, UK, China, USA, India, Iran, Canada, South Africa, North Macedonia, and Turkey): Rittick Roy, Yu-Dai Tsai, Luca Visinelli, Misba Afrin, Alireza Allahyari, Parth Bambhaniya, Dipanjan Dey, Sushant Ghosh, Pankaj Joshi, Kimet Jusufi, Mohsen Khodadi, Rahul Kumar Walia, Ali Övgün, and Cosimo Bambi. We used the EHT image of Sgr A* to test over 50 well-motivated theoretical scenarios, ranging from theories of gravity, novel fundamental physics frameworks, and black hole mimickers such as naked singularities and wormholes. This paper was initially (see v1) written only with Rittick, Yu-Dai, and Luca, tirelessly and also shamelessly ambulance-chased over a weekend following the exciting EHT announcement on May 12, 2022, but was then substantially polished and extended throughout summer 2022 with the addition of all the new authors - it is easily one of the most impactful papers I’ve ever written and at the same time likely the paper that drained the most energy out of me, and I’m really relieved to finally see it accepted for publication, after a very long refereeing process (one of the referee reports was a 4-page long pdf in 10pt font!). You can find the preprint version of the paper on arXiv: 2205.07787.
