Comparing Shadows of Blackhole and Naked Singularity

It is now theoretically well established that not only a black hole can cast shadow, but other compact objects such as naked singularities, gravastar or boson stars can also cast shadows. An intriguing fact that has emerged is that the event horizon and the photon sphere are not necessary for a shadow to form. Now, when two different types of equally massive compact objects cast shadows of same size, then it would be very difficult to distinguish them from each other. However, the nature of the nulllike and timelike geodesics around the two compact objects would be different, since their spacetime geometries are different. Therefore, the intensity distribution of light emitted by the accreting matter around the compact objects would also be different. In this paper, we emphasize this phenomenon in detail. Here, we show that a naked singularity spacetime, namely, the first type of Joshi-Malafarina-Narayan (JMN1) spacetime can be distinguishable from the Schwarzschild blackhole spacetime by the intensity distribution of light, though they have same mass and shadow size. We also use the image processing techniques here to show this difference, where we use the theoretical intensity data. The differences that we get by using the image processing technique may be treated as a theoretical template of intensity differences, which may be useful to analyse the observational data of the image of a compact object.