Super-resolution Polarimetric Imaging of Black Holes using the Event Horizon Telescope

Black holes are thought to reside in the centers of many galaxies; however, due to their diminutive size, we have yet to directly detect and image a black hole. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global array for 1.3mm very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), has been designed to observe and image the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way (Sagittarius A*), as well as the one in the center of the nearby giant elliptical galaxy M87. The nominal resolution of the EHT is around 30 μas, comparable to the size of the black hole’s event horizon. For this reason, we require super-resolution to accurately reconstruct images in total intensity and linear polarization. High fidelity polarimetric imaging can be used to test general relativity and to characterize the magnetic field structure surrounding black holes, which is important for understanding its role in mediating the innermost accretion and outflow region. We employ new sparse imaging techniques based on compressed sensing for linear polarimetry. Using synthetic data of M87 observations with the EHT, we find that our new techniques improve upon the standard CLEAN by a factor of ten regardless of resolution, as measured by the differences in mean squared error (MSE). We conclude that compressed sensing proves to be an effective method for linear polarimetric imaging.