We investigate the effects of quintessence dark energy on the shadows of black hole, surrounded by various profiles of accretions. For the thin-disk accretion, the images of the black hole comprises the dark region and bright region, including direct emission, lensing rings and photon rings. Although their details depend on the form of the emission, generically, direct emission plays a major role for the observed brightness of the black hole, while the lensing ring makes a small contribution and the photon ring makes a negligible contribution. The existence of a cosmological horizon also plays an important role in the shadows, since the observer in the domain of outer communications is near the cosmological horizon. For spherically symmetric accretion, static and infalling matters are considered. We find that the positions of photon spheres are the same for both static and infalling accretions. However, the observed specific intensity of the image for infalling accretion is darker than for static accretion, due to the Doppler effect of the infalling motion.

We investigate the shadows and photon spheres of the four-dimensional Gauss–Bonnet black hole with the static and infalling spherical accretions. We show that, for both cases, there always exist shadows and photon spheres. The radii of the shadows and photon spheres are independent of the profiles of accretion for a fixed Gauss–Bonnet constant, implying that the shadow is a signature of the spacetime geometry and it is hardly influenced by accretion. Because of the Doppler effect, the shadows of the infalling accretion are found to be darker than in the static case. We also investigate the effect of the Gauss–Bonnet constant on the shadow and photon spheres, and we find that the larger the Gauss–Bonnet constant is, the smaller the radii of the shadow and photon spheres will be. In particular, the observed specific intensity increases as the Gauss–Bonnet constant grows.

In this paper, we investigate the shadows and rings of the charged Horndeski black hole illuminated by accretion flow that is both geometrically and optically thin. We consider two types of accretion models: spherical and thin-disk accretion flow. We find that in both types of models, the size of the charged Horndeski black hole shadow decreases with the increase of the charge, and it decreases more slowly for the Reissner–Nordström (RN) black hole. In the spherical accretion flow model, we find that the increase of the charge of Horndeski black hole brightens the light ring around it, and it brightens more significantly in comparison with RN black hole. Due to the Doppler effect, the charged Horndeski black holes with accretion flow of radial motion have darker shadows than those with the static accretion flow, but the size of the shadow is not affected by accretion flow motion. In the thin disk-shaped accretion flow model, we find that the brightness of the light ring around the charged Horndeski black hole is dominated by the direct emission from the accretion flow, and the contribution from lensed rings is relatively small, and that from the photon rings is negligible. We also find that the ring brightness decreases as the charge of Horndeski black hole increases, and the decrease is more significant than that in the RN black hole case. Moreover, the radiation position of the accretion flow can affect the shadow size and the ring brightness of the charged Horndeski black hole.

Taking the quantum electrodynamics (QED) effect into account, we investigate the geometrical-optics appearance of the Euler–Heisenberg (EH) black hole (BH) under the different accretion flows context, which depends on the BH space-time structure and different sources of light. The more significant magnetic charge leads to the smaller shadow radius for the EH BH, while the different values of the EH parameter do not ruin it. Different features of the corresponding two-dimensional shadow images are derived for the three optically thin accretion flow models. It is shown that the total observed intensity in the static spherical accretion flow scenario leads than that of the infalling spherical accretion flow under same parameters, but the size and position of the EH BH shadows do not change in both of these accretions flows, implying that the BH shadow size depends on the geometric space-time and the shadows luminosities rely on the accretion flow morphology. Of particular interest is that a thin disk accretion model illuminated the BH, we found that the contribution of the lensing ring to the total observed flux is less than $$5\%$$5 % , and the photon ring is less than $$2\%$$2 % , indicating that the direct emission dominates the optical appearance of the EH BH. It is also believed that the optical appearance of the BH image depends on the accretion disk radiation position in this scenario, which can serve as a probe for the disk structure around the active galactic nucleus (AGN) of M87 $$^{*}$$∗ like.

Thanks for the releasing image of supermassive black holes (BHs) by the event horizon telescope (EHT) at the heart of the M87 galaxy. After the discovery of this mysterious object, scientists paid attention to exploring the BH shadow features under different gravitational backgrounds. In this scenario, we study the light rings and observational properties of BH shadow surrounded by different accretion flow models and then investigate the effect of model parameters on the observational display and space-time structure of BHs in the framework of our considering system. Under the incompatible configuration of the emission profiles, the images of BHs comprise that the observed luminosity is mainly determined by direct emission, while the lensing ring will provide a small contribution of the total observed flux and the photon ring makes a negligible contribution due to its exponential narrowness. More importantly, the observed regions and specific intensities of all emission profiles are changed correspondingly under variations of parameters. For optically thin accreting matters, we analyze the profile and specific intensity of the shadows with static and infalling accretions models, respectively. We find that with an infalling motion the interior region of the shadows will be darker than the static case, due to the Doppler effect of the infalling movement. Finally, it is concluded that these findings support the fact that the change of BH state parameters will change the way of space-time geometry, thus affecting the BH shadow dynamics.