Abstract
The black hole images obtained with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) are expected to be variable at the dynamical timescale near their horizons. For the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, this timescale (5-61 days) is comparable to the 6 day extent of the 2017 EHT observations. Closure phases along baseline triangles are robust interferometric observables that are sensitive to the expected structural changes of the images but are free of station-based atmospheric and instrumental errors. We explored the day-to-day variability in closure-phase measurements on all six linearly independent nontrivial baseline triangles that can be formed from the 2017 observations. We showed that three triangles exhibit very low day-to-day variability, with a dispersion of ∼3°-5°. The only triangles that exhibit substantially higher variability (∼90°-180°) are the ones with baselines that cross the visibility amplitude minima on the u-v plane, as expected from theoretical modeling. We used two sets of general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations to explore the dependence of the predicted variability on various black hole and accretion-flow parameters. We found that changing the magnetic field configuration, electron temperature model, or black hole spin has a marginal effect on the model consistency with the observed level of variability. On the other hand, the most discriminating image characteristic of models is the fractional width of the bright ring of emission. Models that best reproduce the observed small level of variability are characterized by thin ring-like images with structures dominated by gravitational lensing effects and thus least affected by turbulence in the accreting plasmas.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Article number | 13 |
Journal | Astrophysical Journal |
Volume | 925 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 1 2022 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Space and Planetary Science
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- 10.3847/1538-4357/ac332eLicense: CC BY
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In: Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 925, No. 1, 13, 01.01.2022.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - The Variability of the Black Hole Image in M87 at the Dynamical Timescale
AU - Satapathy, Kaushik
AU - Psaltis, Dimitrios
AU - Özel, Feryal
AU - Medeiros, Lia
AU - Dougall, Sean T.
AU - Chan, Chi Kwan
AU - Wielgus, Maciek
AU - Prather, Ben S.
AU - Wong, George N.
AU - Gammie, Charles F.
AU - Akiyama, Kazunori
AU - Alberdi, Antxon
AU - Alef, Walter
AU - Algaba, Juan Carlos
AU - Anantua, Richard
AU - Asada, Keiichi
AU - Azulay, Rebecca
AU - Baczko, Anne Kathrin
AU - Ball, David
AU - Baloković, Mislav
AU - Barrett, John
AU - Benson, Bradford A.
AU - Bintley, Dan
AU - Blackburn, Lindy
AU - Blundell, Raymond
AU - Boland, Wilfred
AU - Bouman, Katherine L.
AU - Bower, Geoffrey C.
AU - Boyce, Hope
AU - Bremer, Michael
AU - Brinkerink, Christiaan D.
AU - Brissenden, Roger
AU - Britzen, Silke
AU - Broderick, Avery E.
AU - Broguiere, Dominique
AU - Bronzwaer, Thomas
AU - Bustamente, Sandra
AU - Byun, Do Young
AU - Carlstrom, John E.
AU - Chael, Andrew
AU - Chatterjee, Koushik
AU - Chatterjee, Shami
AU - Chen, Ming Tang
AU - Chen, Yongjun
AU - Cho, Ilje
AU - Christian, Pierre
AU - Conway, John E.
AU - Cordes, James M.
AU - Crawford, Thomas M.
AU - Crew, Geoffrey B.
AU - Cruz-Osorio, Alejandro
AU - Cui, Yuzhu
AU - Davelaar, Jordy
AU - De Laurentis, Mariafelicia
AU - Deane, Roger
AU - Dempsey, Jessica
AU - Desvignes, Gregory
AU - Dexter, Jason
AU - Doeleman, Sheperd S.
AU - Eatough, Ralph P.
AU - Falcke, Heino
AU - Farah, Joseph
AU - Fish, Vincent L.
AU - Fomalont, Ed
AU - Ford, H. Alyson
AU - Fraga-Encinas, Raquel
AU - Friberg, Per
AU - Fromm, Christian M.
AU - Fuentes, Antonio
AU - Galison, Peter
AU - García, Roberto
AU - Gentaz, Olivier
AU - Georgiev, Boris
AU - Goddi, Ciriaco
AU - Gold, Roman
AU - Gómez-Ruiz, Arturo I.
AU - Gómez, José L.
AU - Gu, Minfeng
AU - Gurwell, Mark
AU - Hada, Kazuhiro
AU - Haggard, Daryl
AU - Hecht, Michael H.
AU - Hesper, Ronald
AU - Ho, Luis C.
AU - Ho, Paul
AU - Honma, Mareki
AU - Huang, Chih Wei L.
AU - Huang, Lei
AU - Hughes, David H.
AU - Ikeda, Shiro
AU - Inoue, Makoto
AU - Issaoun, Sara
AU - James, David J.
AU - Jannuzi, Buell T.
AU - Janssen, Michael
AU - Jeter, Britton
AU - Jiang, Wu
AU - Jimenez-Rosales, Alejandra
AU - Johnson, Michael D.
AU - Jorstad, Svetlana
AU - Jung, Taehyun
AU - Karami, Mansour
AU - Karuppusamy, Ramesh
AU - Kawashima, Tomohisa
AU - Keating, Garrett K.
AU - Kettenis, Mark
AU - Kim, Dong Jin
AU - Kim, Jae Young
AU - Kim, Jongsoo
AU - Kim, Junhan
AU - Kino, Motoki
AU - Koay, Jun Yi
AU - Kofuji, Yutaro
AU - Koch, Patrick M.
AU - Koyama, Shoko
AU - Kramer, Carsten
AU - Kramer, Michael
AU - Krichbaum, Thomas P.
AU - Kuo, Cheng Yu
AU - Lauer, Tod R.
AU - Lee, Sang Sung
AU - Levis, Aviad
AU - Li, Yan Rong
AU - Li, Zhiyuan
AU - Lindqvist, Michael
AU - Lico, Rocco
AU - Lindahl, Greg
AU - Liu, Jun
AU - Liu, Kuo
AU - Liuzzo, Elisabetta
AU - Lo, Wen Ping
AU - Lobanov, Andrei P.
AU - Loinard, Laurent
AU - Lonsdale, Colin
AU - Lu, Ru Sen
AU - Macdonald, Nicholas R.
AU - Mao, Jirong
AU - Marchili, Nicola
AU - Markoff, Sera
AU - Marrone, Daniel P.
AU - Marscher, Alan P.
AU - Martí-Vidal, Iván
AU - Matsushita, Satoki
AU - Matthews, Lynn D.
AU - Menten, Karl M.
AU - Mizuno, Izumi
AU - Mizuno, Yosuke
AU - Moran, James M.
AU - Moriyama, Kotaro
AU - Moscibrodzka, Monika
AU - Müller, Cornelia
AU - Mejías, Alejandro Mus
AU - Musoke, Gibwa
AU - Nagai, Hiroshi
AU - Nagar, Neil M.
AU - Nakamura, Masanori
AU - Narayan, Ramesh
AU - Narayanan, Gopal
AU - Natarajan, Iniyan
AU - Nathanail, Antonios
AU - Neilsen, Joey
AU - Neri, Roberto
AU - Ni, Chunchong
AU - Noutsos, Aristeidis
AU - Nowak, Michael A.
AU - Okino, Hiroki
AU - Olivares, Héctor
AU - Ortiz-León, Gisela N.
AU - Oyama, Tomoaki
AU - Palumbo, Daniel C.M.
AU - Park, Jongho
AU - Patel, Nimesh
AU - Pen, Ue Li
AU - Pesce, Dominic W.
AU - Piétu, Vincent
AU - Plambeck, Richard
AU - Popstefanija, Aleksandar
AU - Porth, Oliver
AU - Pötzl, Felix M.
AU - Preciado-López, Jorge A.
AU - Pu, Hung Yi
AU - Ramakrishnan, Venkatessh
AU - Rao, Ramprasad
AU - Rawlings, Mark G.
AU - Raymond, Alexander W.
AU - Rezzolla, Luciano
AU - Ripperda, Bart
AU - Roelofs, Freek
AU - Rogers, Alan
AU - Ros, Eduardo
AU - Rose, Mel
AU - Roshanineshat, Arash
AU - Rottmann, Helge
AU - Roy, Alan L.
AU - Ruszczyk, Chet
AU - Rygl, Kazi L.J.
AU - Sánchez, Salvador
AU - Sánchez-Arguelles, David
AU - Sasada, Mahito
AU - Savolainen, Tuomas
AU - Schloerb, F. Peter
AU - Schuster, Karl Friedrich
AU - Shao, Lijing
AU - Shen, Zhiqiang
AU - Small, Des
AU - Sohn, Bong Won
AU - Soohoo, Jason
AU - Sun, He
AU - Tazaki, Fumie
AU - Tetarenko, Alexandra J.
AU - Tiede, Paul
AU - Tilanus, Remo P.J.
AU - Titus, Michael
AU - Toma, Kenji
AU - Torne, Pablo
AU - Traianou, Efthalia
AU - Trent, Tyler
AU - Trippe, Sascha
AU - Van Bemmel, Ilse
AU - Van Langevelde, Huib Jan
AU - Van Rossum, Daniel R.
AU - Wagner, Jan
AU - Ward-Thompson, Derek
AU - Wardle, John
AU - Weintroub, Jonathan
AU - Wex, Norbert
AU - Wharton, Robert
AU - Wiik, Kaj
AU - Wu, Qingwen
AU - Yoon, Doosoo
AU - Young, André
AU - Young, Ken
AU - Younsi, Ziri
AU - Yuan, Feng
AU - Yuan, Ye Fei
AU - Zensus, J. Anton
AU - Zhao, Guang Yao
AU - Zhao, Shan Shan
N1 - The EHT Collaboration thanks the following organizations and programs: the Academy of Finland (projects 274477, 284495, 312496, and 315721); the Agencia Nacional de Investigaci\u00F3n y Desarrollo, Chile via NCN19 (TITANs) and Fondecyt 3190878; the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung; an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship; Allegro, the European ALMA Regional Centre node in the Netherlands, the NL astronomy research network NOVA, and the astronomy institutes of the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, and Radboud University; the black hole Initiative at Harvard University, through a grant (60477) from the John Templeton Foundation; the China Scholarship Council; Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnolog\u00EDa (Mexico, projects U0004-246083, U0004-259839, F0003-272050, M0037-279006, F0003-281692, 104497, 275201, and 263356); the Delaney Family via the Delaney Family John A. Wheeler Chair at Perimeter Institute; Direcci\u00F3n General de Asuntos del Personal Acad\u00E9mico-Universidad Nacional Aut\u00F3noma de M\u00E9xico (projects IN112417 and IN112820); the European Research Council Synergy Grant \u201CBlackHoleCam: Imaging the Event Horizon of Black Holes\u201D (grant 610058); the Generalitat Valenciana postdoctoral grant APOSTD/2018/177 and GenT Program (project CIDEGENT/2018/021); MICINN Research Project PID2019-108995GB-C22; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (grant GBMF-3561); the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare sezione di Napoli, iniziative specifiche TEONGRAV; the International Max Planck Research School for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Universities of Bonn and Cologne; Joint Princeton/Flatiron and Joint Columbia/Flatiron Postdoctoral Fellowships; research at the Flatiron Institute is supported by the Simons Foundation; the Japanese Government (Monbukagakusho: MEXT) Scholarship; the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Research Fellowship (JP17J08829); the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS; grants QYZDJ-SSW-SLH057, QYZDJSSW-SYS008, and ZDBS-LY-SLH011); the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellowship; the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG); the Max-Planck Partner Group of the MPG and the CAS; the MEXT/JSPS KAKENHI (grants 18KK0090, JP18K13594, JP18K03656, JP18H03721, 18K03709, 18H01245, and 25120007); the Malaysian Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS). FRGS/1/2019/STG02/UM/02/6; the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives Funds; the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Taiwan (105-2112-M-001-025-MY3, 106-2112-M-001-011, 106-2119- M-001-027, 107-2119-M-001-017, 107-2119-M-001-020, 107-2119-M-110-005, 108-2112-M-001-048, and 109-2124-M-001-005); the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA; Fermi Guest Investigator grant 80NSSC20K1567, NASA Astrophysics Theory Program grant 80NSSC20K0527, and NASA NuSTAR award 80NSSC20K0645); the National Institute of Natural Sciences of Japan; the National Key Research and Development Program of China (grants 2016YFA0400704 and 2016YFA0400702); the National Science Foundation (NSF; grants AST-0096454, AST-0352953, AST-0521233, AST-0705062, AST-0905844, AST-0922984, AST-1126433, AST-1140030, DGE-1144085, AST-1207704, AST-1207730, AST-1207752, MRI-1228509, OPP-1248097, AST-1310896, AST-1555365, AST-1615796, AST-1715061, AST-1716327, AST-1903847, and AST-2034306); the Natural Science Foundation of China (grants 11573051, 11633006, 11650110427, 10625314, 11721303, 11725312, 11933007, 11991052, and 11991053); a fellowship of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2020M671266); the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC; including a Discovery Grant and the NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarships-Doctoral Program); the National Youth Thousand Talents Program of China; the National Research Foundation of Korea (the Global PhD Fellowship Grant: grants NRF-2015H1A2A1033752 and 2015- R1D1A1A01056807; the Korea Research Fellowship Program: NRF-2015H1D3A1066561 and Basic Research Support Grant 2019R1F1A1059721); the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research VICI award (grant 639.043.513) and Spinoza Prize SPI 78-409; the New Scientific Frontiers with Precision Radio Interferometry Fellowship awarded by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is a facility of the National Research Foundation, an agency of the Department of Science and Technology of South Africa; the Onsala Space Observatory (OSO) national infrastructure, for the provisioning of its facilities/observational support (OSO receives funding through the Swedish Research Council under grant 2017\u201300648) the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (research at Perimeter Institute is supported by the Government of Canada through the Department of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Research, Innovation, and Science); the Spanish Ministerio de Econom\u00EDa y Competitividad (grants PGC2018-098915-B-C21, AYA2016-80889-P, and PID2019-108995GB-C21); the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the \u201CCenter of Excellence Severo Ochoa\u201D award for the Instituto de Astrof\u00EDsica de Andaluc\u00EDa (SEV-2017\u20130709); the Toray Science Foundation; the Consejer\u00EDa de Econom\u00EDa, Conocimiento, Empresas y Universidad of the Junta de Andaluc\u00EDa (grant P18-FR-1769), the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cient\u00EDficas (grant 2019AEP112); the US Department of Energy (USDOE) through the Los Alamos National Laboratory (operated by Triad National Security, LLC), for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the USDOE (Contract 89233218CNA000001); the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 730562 RadioNet; ALMA North America Development Fund; the Academia Sinica; Chandra DD7-18089X and TM6-17006X; the GenT Program (Generalitat Valenciana) Project CIDEGENT/2018/021. This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), supported by NSF grant ACI-1548562, and CyVerse, supported by NSF grants DBI-0735191, DBI-1265383, and DBI-1743442. XSEDE Stampede2 resource at TACC was allocated through TG-AST170024 and TG-AST080026N. XSEDE JetStream resource at PTI and TACC was allocated through AST170028. The simulations were performed in part on the SuperMUC cluster at the LRZ in Garching, on the LOEWE cluster in CSC in Frankfurt, and on the HazelHen cluster at the HLRS in Stuttgart. This research was enabled, in part, by support provided by Compute Ontario ( http://computeontario.ca ), Calcul Quebec ( http://www.calculquebec.ca ), and Compute Canada ( http://www.computecanada.ca ). We thank the staff at the participating observatories, correlation centers, and institutions for their enthusiastic support. This paper makes use of the following ALMA data: ADS/JAO.ALMA#2016.1.01154.V. ALMA is a partnership of the European Southern Observatory (ESO; Europe, representing its member states), NSF, and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences of Japan, together with National Research Council (Canada), MOST (Taiwan), the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA; Taiwan), and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI; Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI)/NRAO, and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The NRAO is a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement by AUI. APEX is a collaboration between the Max-Planck-Institut f\u00FCr Radioastronomie (Germany), ESO, and the OSO (Sweden). The SMA is a joint project between the SAO and ASIAA and is funded by the Smithsonian Institution and the Academia Sinica. The JCMT is operated by the East Asian Observatory on behalf of the NAOJ, ASIAA, and KASI, as well as the Ministry of Finance of China, CAS, and the National Key R&D Program (No. 2017YFA0402700) of China. Additional funding support for the JCMT is provided by the Science and Technologies Facility Council (UK) and participating universities in the UK and Canada. The LMT is a project operated by the Instituto Nacional de Astr\u00F3fisica, \u00D3ptica, y Electr\u00F3nica (Mexico) and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (USA). The IRAM 30 m telescope in Pico Veleta, Spain is operated by IRAM and supported by CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France), MPG (Max-Planck Gesellschaft, Germany), and IGN (Instituto Geogr\u00E1fico Nacional, Spain). The SMT is operated by the Arizona Radio Observatory, a part of the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona, with financial support of operations from the State of Arizona and financial support for instrumentation development from the NSF. The SPT is supported by the NSF through grant PLR-1248097. Partial support is also provided by the NSF Physics Frontier Center grant PHY-1125897 to the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Kavli Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant GBMF 947. The SPT hydrogen maser was provided on loan from the GLT, courtesy of ASIAA. The EHTC has received generous donations of FPGA chips from Xilinx Inc., under the Xilinx University Program. The EHTC has benefited from technology shared under an open-source license by the Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research. The EHT project is grateful to T4Science and Microsemi for their assistance with hydrogen masers. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System. We gratefully acknowledge the support provided by the extended staff of the ALMA, both from the inception of the ALMA Phasing Project through the observational campaigns of 2017 and 2018. We would like to thank A. Deller and W. Brisken for the EHT-specific support with the use of DiFX. We acknowledge the significance that Maunakea, where the SMA and JCMT-EHT stations are located, has for the indigenous Hawaiian people. 058 This work was supported, in part, by the NSF PIRE award 1743747 and NASA ATP award 80NSSC20K0521. L.M. acknowledges support from an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award No. AST-1903847. M.W. acknowledges the support of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, which is funded by grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to Harvard University. All ray tracing calculations for Set A were performed with the El Gato GPU cluster at the University of Arizona that is funded by NSF award 1228509. All analyses for Set B were performed on CyVerse, supported by NSF grants DBI-0735191, DBI-1265383, and DBI-1743442.
PY - 2022/1/1
Y1 - 2022/1/1
N2 - The black hole images obtained with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) are expected to be variable at the dynamical timescale near their horizons. For the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, this timescale (5-61 days) is comparable to the 6 day extent of the 2017 EHT observations. Closure phases along baseline triangles are robust interferometric observables that are sensitive to the expected structural changes of the images but are free of station-based atmospheric and instrumental errors. We explored the day-to-day variability in closure-phase measurements on all six linearly independent nontrivial baseline triangles that can be formed from the 2017 observations. We showed that three triangles exhibit very low day-to-day variability, with a dispersion of ∼3°-5°. The only triangles that exhibit substantially higher variability (∼90°-180°) are the ones with baselines that cross the visibility amplitude minima on the u-v plane, as expected from theoretical modeling. We used two sets of general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations to explore the dependence of the predicted variability on various black hole and accretion-flow parameters. We found that changing the magnetic field configuration, electron temperature model, or black hole spin has a marginal effect on the model consistency with the observed level of variability. On the other hand, the most discriminating image characteristic of models is the fractional width of the bright ring of emission. Models that best reproduce the observed small level of variability are characterized by thin ring-like images with structures dominated by gravitational lensing effects and thus least affected by turbulence in the accreting plasmas.
AB - The black hole images obtained with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) are expected to be variable at the dynamical timescale near their horizons. For the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, this timescale (5-61 days) is comparable to the 6 day extent of the 2017 EHT observations. Closure phases along baseline triangles are robust interferometric observables that are sensitive to the expected structural changes of the images but are free of station-based atmospheric and instrumental errors. We explored the day-to-day variability in closure-phase measurements on all six linearly independent nontrivial baseline triangles that can be formed from the 2017 observations. We showed that three triangles exhibit very low day-to-day variability, with a dispersion of ∼3°-5°. The only triangles that exhibit substantially higher variability (∼90°-180°) are the ones with baselines that cross the visibility amplitude minima on the u-v plane, as expected from theoretical modeling. We used two sets of general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations to explore the dependence of the predicted variability on various black hole and accretion-flow parameters. We found that changing the magnetic field configuration, electron temperature model, or black hole spin has a marginal effect on the model consistency with the observed level of variability. On the other hand, the most discriminating image characteristic of models is the fractional width of the bright ring of emission. Models that best reproduce the observed small level of variability are characterized by thin ring-like images with structures dominated by gravitational lensing effects and thus least affected by turbulence in the accreting plasmas.
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U2 - 10.3847/1538-4357/ac332e
DO - 10.3847/1538-4357/ac332e
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85125877065
SN - 0004-637X
VL - 925
JO - Astrophysical Journal
JF - Astrophysical Journal
IS - 1
M1 - 13
ER -