Imaging black holes with simulated space expansions to the event horizon telescope
Name
1128179691-MIT.pdf
Size
5.96 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d77cfbf673791c66835037c02b6b123a
Author(s)
Palumbo, Daniel(Daniel C.)
Advisor(s)
Sheperd Doeleman and Nevin Weinberg.
Date Issued
2018
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a multinational Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) network of dishes joined to resolve general relativistic behavior near a supermassive black hole. The imaging quality of the EHT is largely dependent upon the sensitivity and spatial frequency coverage of the many baselines between its constituent telescopes. The EHT already contains many highly sensitive dishes, including the crucial Atacama Large Millimeter/ Submillimeter Array (ALMA), making it viable to add smaller, cheaper telescopes to the array, greatly improving future capabilities of the EHT. We explore the feasibility of adding small orbiting dishes to the EHT, and develop orbital optimization tools for space-based VLBI imaging. Unlike the Millimetron mission planned to be at L2, we specifically treat low and medium Earth orbiters which rapidly fill spatial frequency coverage across a large range of baseline lengths. Finally, we demonstrate significant improvement in image quality when adding small dishes to planned arrays in simulated observations of both SgrA* and M87.
Description
Thesis: S.B., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Physics, 2018
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 47-52).
Subjects
Physics.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Terms of Use
MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.
Persistent DSpace Link
