Imaging black holes: past, present and future

TL;DR

This paper reviews the history, current efforts, and future prospects of imaging black holes, emphasizing the potential to observe the event horizon and test fundamental physics using advanced radio telescopes.

Contribution

It highlights the development of black hole imaging techniques, including the Event Horizon Telescope, and discusses future improvements like space arrays and star orbit measurements.

Findings

First images of black hole shadows are being pursued.

Future telescopes could produce more detailed black hole images.

Combining imaging with star and pulsar observations will enhance black hole studies.

Abstract

This paper briefly reviews past, current, and future efforts to image black holes in the radio regime. Black holes seem like mystical objects, but they are an integral part of current astrophysics and are at the center of attempts to unify quantum physics and general relativity. Yet, nobody has ever seen a black hole. What do they look like? Initially, this question seemed more of an academic nature. However, this has changed over the past two decades. Observations and theoretical considerations suggest that the supermassive black hole, Sgr A*, in the center of our Milky Way is surrounded by a compact, foggy emission region radiating at and above 230 GHz. It has been predicted that the event horizon of Sgr A* should cast its shadow onto that emission region, which could be detectable with a global VLBI array of radio telescopes. In contrast to earlier pictures of black holes, that dark feature is not supposed to be due to a hole in the accretion flow, but would represent a true negative image of the event horizon. Currently, the global Event Horizon Telescope consortium is attempting to make such an image. In the future those images could be improved by adding more telescopes to the array, in particular at high sites in Africa. Ultimately, a space array at THz frequencies, the Event Horizon Imager, could produce much more detailed images of black holes. In combination with numerical simulations and precise measurements of the orbits of stars - ideally also of pulsars - these images will allow us to study black holes with unprecedented precision.