THEZA: TeraHertz Exploration and Zooming-in for Astrophysics
Journal article, 2021
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 similar to 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 Base-line 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.
VLBI
Spaceborne astrophysics
Super-massive black hole
Radio interferometry
mm- and sub-mm astronomy
Author
Leonid I. Gurvits
Delft University of Technology
Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE)
Zsolt Paragi
Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE)
Viviana Casasola
Istituto nazionale di astrofisica (INAF)
John Conway
Chalmers, Space, Earth and Environment, Onsala Space Observatory
Jordy Davelaar
Radboud University
Heino Falcke
Radboud University
Rob Fender
University of Oxford
S. Frey
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE)
Christian M. Fromm
Goethe University Frankfurt
Cristina Garcia Miro
Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE)
Michael A. Garrett
University of Manchester
Leiden University
Marcello Giroletti
Istituto nazionale di astrofisica (INAF)
Ciriaco Goddi
Radboud University
Jose-Luis Gomez
Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
Jeffrey van der Gucht
Radboud University
Jose Carlos Guirado
Universitat de Valencia
Zoltan Haiman
Columbia University
Frank Helmich
Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON)
University of Groningen
Elizabeth Humphreys
European Southern Observatory (ESO)
Violette Impellizzeri
Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array (ALMA)
Michael Kramer
Max Planck Society
Michael Lindqvist
Chalmers, Space, Earth and Environment, Onsala Space Observatory
Hendrik Linz
Max Planck Society
Elisabetta Liuzzo
Istituto nazionale di astrofisica (INAF)
Andrei P. Lobanov
Max Planck Society
Yosuke Mizuno
Goethe University Frankfurt
Luciano Rezzolla
Goethe University Frankfurt
Freek Roelofs
Radboud University
Eduardo Ros
Max Planck Society
Kazi L. J. Rygl
Istituto nazionale di astrofisica (INAF)
Tuomas Savolainen
Aalto University
Max Planck Society
Karl Schuster
Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique (IRAM)
Tiziana Venturi
Istituto nazionale di astrofisica (INAF)
Martina C. Wiedner
Université Paris PSL
J. Anton Zensus
Max Planck Society
Experimental Astronomy
0922-6435 (ISSN) 1572-9508 (eISSN)
Vol. 51 3 559-594Subject Categories
Astronomy, Astrophysics and Cosmology
Architecture
Signal Processing
DOI
10.1007/s10686-021-09714-y