Imaging black holes with sparse modeling

We introduce a new imaging method for radio interferometry based on sparse- modeling. The direct observables in radio interferometry are visibilities, which are Fourier transformation of an astronomical image on the sky-plane, and incomplete sampling of visibilities in the spatial frequency domain results in an under-determined problem, which has been usually solved with 0 filling to un-sampled grids. In this paper we propose to directly solve this under-determined problem using sparse modeling without 0 filling, which realizes super resolution, i.e., resolution higher than the standard refraction limit. We show simulation results of sparse modeling for the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations of super-massive black holes and demonstrate that our approach has significant merit in observations of black hole shadows expected to be realized in near future. We also present some results with the method applied to real data, and also discuss more advanced techniques for practical observations such as imaging with closure phase as well as treating the effect of interstellar scattering effect.