On the prospects of imaging Sagittarius A* from space

Abstract

Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) at sub-millimeter waves has the potential to image the shadow of the black hole in the Galactic Center, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), and thereby test basic predictions of the theory of general relativity. We investigate the imaging prospects of a new Space VLBI mission concept. The setup consists of two satellites in polar or equatorial circular Medium-Earth Orbits with slightly different radii, resulting in a dense spiral-shaped uv-coverage with long baselines, allowing for extremely high-resolution and high-fidelity imaging of radio sources. We simulate observations of a general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics model of Sgr A* for this configuration with noise calculated from model system parameters. After gridding the $uv$-plane and averaging visibilities accumulated over multiple months of integration, images of Sgr A* with a resolution of up to 4 $\mu$as could be reconstructed, allowing for stronger tests of general relativity and accretion models than with ground-based VLBI.

4 pages, 4 figures, published in Proceedings IAU Symposium No. 342, 2018

References in corpus (2)

• The Submillimeter Bump in Sgr A* from Relativistic MHD Simulations
• Dynamical Imaging with Interferometry

Cited by in corpus (1)

• First Sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope Results. VI: Testing the Black Hole Metric