Rotating black holes without $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry and their shadow images

The recent detection of gravitational waves from black hole coalescences and the first image of the black hole shadow enhance the possibilities of testing gravitational theories in the strong-field regime. In this paper, we study the physical properties and the shadow image of a class of Kerr-like rotating black holes, whose $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry is generically broken. Such black hole solutions could arise in effective low-energy theories of a fundamental quantum theory of gravity, such as string theory. Within a theory-agnostic framework, we require that the Kerr-like solutions are asymptotically flat, and assume that a Carter-like constant is preserved, enabling the geodesic equations to be fully separable. Subject to these two requirements, we find that the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ asymmetry of the spacetime is characterized by two arbitrary functions of polar angle. The shadow image turns out to be $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetric on the celestial coordinates. Furthermore, the shadow is completely blind to one of the arbitrary functions. The other function, although would affect the apparent size of the shadow, it hardly distorts the shadow contour and has merely no degeneracy with the spin parameter. Therefore, the parameters in this function can be constrained with black hole shadows, only when the mass and the distance of the black hole from the earth are measured with great precision.