Strong gravitational lensing by Sgr A

In recent years, there has been increasing recognition of the potential to use the galactic center as a probe of general relativity in the strong field. There is almost certainly a black hole at Sgr A* in the galactic center, and this would allow us to have the opportunity to probe dynamics near the exterior of the black hole. In the last decade, there has been theoretical research into extreme gravitational lensing in the galactic center. Unlike in most applications of gravitational lensing, where the bending angle is of the order of, at most, an arc minute, very large bending angles are possible for light that closely approaches a black hole. Photons may even loop multiple times around a black hole before reaching the observer. There have been many proposals to use light's close approach to the black hole as a probe of the black hole metric. Of particular interest are the properties of images formed from the light of S stars orbiting in the galactic center. This paper will review some of the attempts made to study extreme lensing as well as extend the analysis of S star lensing. In particular, we are interested in the effect of a Reissner–Nordstrom like 1/r2 term in the metric and how this would affect the properties of relativistic images.