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Observational distinguishability of the Kerr and Kerr-Hayward metrics to EHT

Nikola Bukowiecka*

Angelo Ricarte

Prashant Kocherlakota

Cora Prather

  • Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

  • *Contact author: nikola.bukowiecka@uri.edu
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 023008 – Published 6 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/rfrx-tfz8

Abstract

Astrophysical black holes appear well-represented by the Kerr metric, whose maximal analytic extension contains a ringlike curvature singularity. We study a phenomenological regularized modification of Kerr, the modified Kerr-Hayward metric, which removes curvature blowup at the level of the stationary metric while preserving in detail many features of polarized black hole images now testable by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). To establish this, we produce new general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) simulations of a magnetized plasma in a Kerr-Hayward spacetime, then we extend the EHT analysis framework to perform polarized radiative transfer in this spacetime. We detail our methodology for implementing this modified spacetime into an open-source pipeline. From fluid quantities such as the magnetic flux parameter and jet efficiency, to image quantities such as the polarization pattern and the photon ring structure, our results for the Kerr-Hayward metric appear functionally indistinguishable from the Kerr metric. Our study finds that under the assumptions of a fixed-background GRMHD and polarized radiative transfer pipeline, this regularized phenomenological modification to the Kerr metric can yield observables that are effectively indistinguishable in EHT measurements.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 023008– Published 6 July, 2026
  • Received 17 April 2026
  • Accepted 16 June 2026
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