TeraHertz Exploration and Zooming-in for Astrophysics (THEZA): ESA Voyage 2050 White Paper

Abstract

This paper presents the ESA Voyage 2050 White Paper for a concept of TeraHertz Exploration and Zooming-in for Astrophysics (THEZA). It addresses the science case and some implementation issues of a space-borne radio interferometric system for ultra-sharp imaging of celestial radio sources at the level of angular resolution down to (sub-) microarcseconds. THEZA focuses at millimetre and sub-millimetre wavelengths (frequencies above $\sim$300~GHz), but allows for science operations at longer wavelengths too. The THEZA concept science rationale is focused on the physics of spacetime in the vicinity of supermassive black holes as the leading science driver. The main aim of the concept is to facilitate a major leap by providing researchers with orders of magnitude improvements in the resolution and dynamic range in direct imaging studies of the most exotic objects in the Universe, black holes. The concept will open up a sizeable range of hitherto unreachable parameters of observational astrophysics. It unifies two major lines of development of space-borne radio astronomy of the past decades: Space VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) and mm- and sub-mm astrophysical studies with "single dish" instruments. It also builds upon the recent success of the Earth-based Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) -- the first-ever direct image of a shadow of the super-massive black hole in the centre of the galaxy M87. As an amalgam of these three major areas of modern observational astrophysics, THEZA aims at facilitating a breakthrough in high-resolution high image quality studies in the millimetre and sub-millimetre domain of the electromagnetic spectrum.

White Paper submitted in response to the ESA Call Voyage 2050

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Cited by in corpus (17)

• First Sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope Results. VI: Testing the Black Hole Metric
• Photon rings of spherically symmetric black holes and robust tests of non-Kerr metrics
• The Black Hole Explorer: Motivation and Vision
• The Galactic Center as a laboratory for theories of gravity and dark matter
• RadioAstron Space VLBI Imaging of the jet in M87: I. Detection of high brightness temperature at 22 GHz
• The Role of Terahertz and Far-IR Spectroscopy in Understanding the Formation and Evolution of Interstellar Prebiotic Molecules
• An Event Horizon Imager (EHI) Mission Concept Utilizing Medium Earth Orbit Sub-mm Interferometry
• The future ability to test theories of gravity with black-hole shadows
• Orbital configurations of spaceborne interferometers for studying photon rings of supermassive black holes
• Measuring Black Hole Light Echoes with Very Long Baseline Interferometry
• Imaging the event horizon of M87* from space on different timescales
• Fractal signatures of non-Kerr spacetimes in the shadow of light-ring bifurcations
• Toward Optimisation of a Sub-Terahertz Spaceborne VLBI Mission
• Microlensing Black Hole Shadows
• Milliarcsecond astrometric oscillations in active galactic nuclei as a precursor of multi-messenger gravitational wave events
• Beyond Sgr A* and M87*: Sub-Microarcsecond Black Hole Shadow Detection via Lunar-based Extremely Long Baseline Interferometry
• The science case and challenges of space-borne sub-millimeter interferometry