Comment by hnuser123456
4 days ago
This is still nice when there are so many artistic images of black holes that do not take such care to use known physics to create an accurate image. Well done all. Looking forward to seeing what BHEX sees.
4 days ago
This is still nice when there are so many artistic images of black holes that do not take such care to use known physics to create an accurate image. Well done all. Looking forward to seeing what BHEX sees.
Glad to hear you're excited about BHEX---we are too!
If you want to read more about what it's going to do, I wrote a blog post about it on the mission website: https://www.blackholeexplorer.org/bhex-blog/lupsasca-stateme...
Read all of it, only question I have is... napkin math, how much more resolution over EHT alone?
About ~5x improvement. Recall that the resolution of an interferometric array is set by the distance between telescopes measured in units of the observation wavelength. BHEX will get a ~3x resolution improvement from the increased distance between the space satellite and our ground telescopes (for the EHT, the max telescope separation is limited by the diameter of the Earth) and another ~50% from the increased frequency of observations (going up from 230 to 320 GHz).
5x is actually a lot: we'll be able to resolve the "photon ring" of orbiting light around M87* and Sgr A* (the two black holes previously imaged by EHT at lower resolution) and likely see the "shadows" of another 6-8 black holes, with the possibility of estimating the mass of another ~20-30 sources.
1 reply →