Shadow of a charged black hole with scalar hair

Abstract Seeking singularity free solutions are important for further understanding black holes in quantum level. Recently, a five-dimensional singularity free black hole/topological star was constructed (Bah and Heidmann in Phys Rev Lett 126:151101, 2021). Through the Kaluza–Klein reduction, an effective four-dimensional static spherically symmetric charged black hole with scalar hair can be obtained. In this paper, we study shadow of this charged black hole with scalar hair in terms of four kinds of observers, i.e., static observers, surrounding observers, freely falling observers, and escaping observers in four-dimensional spacetime. For a spherically symmetric black hole, the shadow is circular for any observer, but the shadow size depends on the motion status of the observer. On the other hand, the effect of plasma is also investigated by a simple model. The radius of the photon sphere depends on the plasma model. Most importantly, we find that the shadow sizes do not monotonically decrease with r in some cases.