Multiscale probing of a Hernquist-type environmental black hole spacetime with the Sgr A* shadow and S2 orbital dynamics

Abstract

The supermassive black hole Sgr A* at the Galactic center provides a unique opportunity to probe the distribution of environmental matter around black holes. In this work, we adopt the Hernquist-type environmental black hole spacetime, a non-vacuum exact solution of the Einstein field equations, as its gravitational model to describe the joint gravitational field of the black hole and its surrounding matter, with environmental effects characterized by the dimensionless compactness $C$ and the characteristic scale $α$. We combine black hole shadow data with two sets of S2 star data provided by Do et al. and Gillessen et al., and constrain the model parameters using the Markov chain Monte Carlo method. At the 95\% credible upper limit, the shadow-only data constrain $C < 1.498\times10^{-1}$.but provide no effective constraint on $α$. The two S2 datasets yield $C<5.239\times10^{-5}$ and $C<1.303\times10^{-4}$, respectively, with $α$ exhibiting a bimodal structure in both cases. After combining the shadow and S2 star data, the $C$ upper limits are tightened to $C<3.760\times10^{-5}$ and $C<1.073\times10^{-4}$, respectively. These results indicate that current observations rule out highly compact configurations of the environmental halo, while the obtained constraints are consistent with the typical compactness range of matter halos. However, $α$ still exhibits a significant bimodal degeneracy, indicating that current observations are insufficient to uniquely determine the radial distribution of the environmental halo. Future observations of multiple stellar orbits may provide further insights into the radial structure of the environmental halo.