Yuxuan Shi, Hongbo Cheng
Abstract The observational appearance of a black hole is critically dependent on the surrounding accreting matter, in particular on the central brightness depression and photon ring structure. We perform a systematic comparative analysis of the observational signatures of a Schwarzschild black hole embedded in a Hernquist dark matter (DM) halo under three distinct accretion scenarios: a geometrically thin disk, a static spherical flow, and an infalling spherical flow. For the thin disk model, we find that direct emission dominates the total observed intensity, while the size and brightness of the lensing and photon rings serve as sensitive probes of the Hernquist DM parameters. From a geometric perspective, the Hernquist DM halo significantly enlarges the photon sphere, resulting in an observable critical curve radius approximately 2% to 30% larger than in the vacuum case. Regarding the radiative signatures, the measured intensity profiles, which rely on the particular accretion models, show a general brightness suppression, which is especially affected by the Doppler de-boosting in the infalling scenario. Our results suggest that the size of the central brightness depression and the brightness profile of the black hole image provide a valuable theoretical framework for constraining the distribution of dark matter in galactic centers.