Related papers: Machine- and deep-learning-driven angular momentum…
The $n=1$ photon ring is a full image of the astrophysical source around a black hole, produced by photons that execute $n\approx1$ half-orbit around the event horizon on their way to an observer. The Black Hole Explorer (BHEX) is a…
General relativity predicts that black hole images ought to display a bright, thin (and as-of-yet-unresolved) ring. This "photon ring" is produced by photons that explore the strong gravity of the black hole, flowing along trajectories that…
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the first images of a black hole using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). In the near future, extensions of the EHT such as the Black Hole Explorer (BHEX) will allow access to finer-scale…
General relativity predicts that images of optically thin accretion flows around black holes should generically have a ``photon ring,'' composed of a series of increasingly sharp subrings that correspond to increasingly strongly lensed…
The Black Hole Explorer (BHEX), an orbiting, multi-band, millimeter radio-telescope, in hybrid combination with millimeter terrestrial radio-telescopes, is designed to discover and measure the thin photon ring around the supermassive black…
We present the Black Hole Explorer (BHEX), a mission that will produce the sharpest images in the history of astronomy by extending submillimeter Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) to space. BHEX will discover and measure the bright…
Accurately inferring black hole spin is crucial for understanding black hole dynamics and their astrophysical environments. In this work, we outline a geometric method for spin estimation by using the interferometric shape of the first…
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) recently released the first horizon-scale images of the black hole in M87. Combined with other astronomical data, these images constrain the mass and spin of the hole as well as the accretion rate and…
Images of black holes encode both astrophysical and gravitational properties. Detecting highly-lensed features in images can differentiate between these two effects. We present an accretion disk emission model coupled to the Adaptive…
Using very long baseline interferometry, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration has resolved the shadows of two supermassive black holes. Model comparison is traditionally performed in image space, where imaging algorithms…
The Event Horizon Telescope recently observed the first shadow of a black hole. Images like this can potentially be used to test or constrain theories of gravity and deepen the understanding in plasma physics at event horizon scales, which…
In this study, we have considered the Kerr-like black hole (BH) model in Horndeski gravity and analyse the visual characteristics of shadow images under two illumination models, such as a celestial light source and a thin accretion disk. To…
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is providing unprecedented high-resolution images of supermassive black holes. These images are fundamentally related to properties of the luminous accretion disks, since black holes themselves produce no…
We present a baseline science operations plan for the Black Hole Explorer (BHEX), a space mission concept aiming to confirm the existence of the predicted sharp ``photon ring" resulting from strongly lensed photon trajectories around black…
The Black Hole Explorer (BHEX) is a space very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) mission concept that is currently under development. BHEX will study supermassive black holes at unprecedented resolution, isolating the signature of the…
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration recently released horizon-scale images of the supermassive black hole M87*. These images are consistently described by an optically thin, lensed accretion flow in the Kerr spacetime. General…
Using general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of accreting black holes, we show that a suitable subtraction of the linear polarization per pixel from total intensity images can enhance the photon ring features. We find that the…
Simulated images of a black hole surrounded by optically thin emission typically display two main features: a central brightness depression and a narrow, bright "photon ring" consisting of strongly lensed images superposed on top of the…
Black holes described by the Kerr metric can have a theoretical maximum dimensionless spin parameter of $a_\bullet = 1$, but several effects may limit the maximum spin parameter in astrophysical systems. We perform general relativistic…
The direct detection of a bright, ring-like structure in horizon-resolving images of M87* by the Event Horizon Telescope is a striking validation of general relativity. The angular size and shape of the ring is a degenerate measure of the…