The ngEHT Analysis Challenges

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The next-generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) will be a significant enhancement of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) array, with ∼10 new antennas and instrumental upgrades of existing antennas. The increased -coverage, sensitivity, and frequency coverage allow a wide range of new science opportunities to be explored. The ngEHT Analysis Challenges have been launched to inform the development of the ngEHT array design, science objectives, and analysis pathways. For each challenge, synthetic EHT and ngEHT datasets are generated from theoretical source models and released to the challenge participants, who analyze the datasets using image reconstruction and other methods. The submitted analysis results are evaluated with quantitative metrics. In this work, we report on the first two ngEHT Analysis Challenges. These have focused on static and dynamical models of M87* and Sgr A* and shown that high-quality movies of the extended jet structure of M87* and near-horizon hourly timescale variability of Sgr A* can be reconstructed by the reference ngEHT array in realistic observing conditions using current analysis algorithms. We identify areas where there is still room for improvement of these algorithms and analysis strategies. Other science cases and arrays will be explored in future challenges. © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This research was supported by NSF grants AST-1935980 and AST-2034306. This work was supported by the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, made possible through the support of grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Moore or Templeton Foundations. Hendrik Müller received financial support for this research from the International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Universities of Bonn and Cologne. This research is supported by the DFG research grant “Jet physics on horizon scales and beyond” (Grant No. FR 4069/2-1), the ERC synergy grant “BlackHoleCam: Imaging the Event Horizon of Black Holes” (Grant No. 610058) and ERC advanced grant “JETSET: Launching, propagation and emission of relativistic jets from binary mergers and across mass scales” (Grant No. 884631). Jakob Knollmüller acknowledges funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy—EXC 2094—390783311. Razieh Emami acknowledges the support by the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics as well as grant numbers 21-atp21-0077, NSF AST-1816420 and HST-GO-16173.001-A for very generous support.
With funding from the Spanish government through the "Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence" accreditation (CEX2021-001131-S).