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.
Highlights
The already superb angular resolution of the EVN can be sharpened by observing at shorter wavelengths, as has been achieved by the Global Millimetre Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) Array (GMVA3), another world-spanning array consisting of sixteen antennas operating at 3.5 mm (85–95 GHz band)
There are good reasons to believe this is not the case for sub-pc massive black hole binaries (MBHB). This is because the most common MBHB are likely formed in minor mergers that have unequal mass black holes; below about 0.1 pc the binary is embedded in an accretion disc and gas interaction becomes important [2]
Follow-up radio observations of high-energy astrophysical transients has a rich history of important discoveries, including the first galactic superluminal source [90], the beamed-like nature of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) and their association with unusual supernovae [69] and the association of highly relativistic jet-like flows with the tidal disruption and accretion of a star by a supermassive black hole [123]
Summary
Optical interferometry with ESO’s Gravity experiment has imaged the motion of gas around the Super-massive Black Hole (SMBH) in the centre of Milky Way [36, 37] and Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) in the radio domain has imaged the innermost structures of jets and recently even the black hole shadow in the centre of the radio galaxy M87 [19,20,21,22,23,24] These new results are quantum leaps and they only mark the beginning. Once one has access to the extreme resolution provided by Space VLBI, other than SMBH imaging science cases will become possible with the same technology, which we briefly touch upon
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