Search Talks

To improve the EHT?s sensitivity, resolution and imaging fidelity one might enhance station collecting area, add stations, or increase bandwidth. The latter improvement, bandwidth, is probably the most accessible. For many stations, including Submillimeter Array (SMA), the bandwidth is limited not by the receiver but by the digital signal processing. This talk will describe digital development at SMA. The upgraded SMA will contribute directly to the EHT, and technology under development has potential to benefit other EHT stations as well.

You've just finished running your code, and you're certain that you (and only you) know exactly what the region around a supermassive black hole looks like. You could lie back and wait for the accolades to roll in, but why not take an extra moment to make testable predictions that even the observers can understand? Synthetic data can help.

Scattering in the tenuous interstellar plasma blurs the image of Sgr A*. This effect decreases steeply with increasing frequency and becomes subdominant to the intrinsic emission structure at wavelengths close to a millimeter. I will discuss recent work that demonstrates how we can invert the blurring when properties of the scattering are known. With this technique, we can reconstruct the unscattered image of Sgr A* using EHT data. I will also show why some EHT observables -- such as closure phase and fractional polarization -- are largely immune to scattering. Finally, despite decades of study, there has been a recent flurry of progress in understanding the scattering properties, including studies of the Galactic Center magnetar and the discovery of refractive substructure in the scattering disk of Sgr A* at 1.3-cm wavelength. I will discuss these recent findings and their implications for imaging Sgr A* with the EHT