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Toward Determining the Number of Observable Supermassive Black Hole Shadows by Pesce, Dominic W.; Palumbo, Daniel C. M.; Narayan, Ramesh; Blackburn, Lindy; Doeleman, Sheperd S.; Johnson, Michael D.; Ma, Chung-Pei; Nagar, Neil M.; Natarajan, Priyamvada; Ricarte, Angelo is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Toward Determining the Number of Observable Supermassive Black Hole Shadows about?

We present estimates for the number of shadow-resolved supermassive black hole (SMBH) systems that can be detected using radio interferometers, as a function of angular resolution, flux density sensitivity, and observing frequency. Accounting for the distribution of SMBHs across mass, redshift, and accretion rate, we use a new semi-analytic spectral energy distribution model to derive the number of SMBHs with detectable and optically thin horizon-scale emission. We demonstrate that (sub)millimeter interferometric observations with ${\sim}0.1$ $\mu$as resolution and ${\sim}1$ $\mu$Jy sensitivity could access ${>}10^6$ SMBH shadows. We then further decompose the shadow source counts into the number of black holes for which we could expect to observe the first- and second-order lensed photon rings. Accessing the bulk population of first-order photon rings requires ${\lesssim}2$ $\mu$as resolution and ${\lesssim}0.5$ mJy sensitivity, while doing the same for second-order photon rings requires ${\lesssim}0.1$ $\mu$as resolution and ${\lesssim}5$ $\mu$Jy sensitivity. Our model predicts that with modest improvements to sensitivity, as many as $\sim$5 additional horizon-resolved sources sh

Author

Pesce, Dominic W.; Palumbo, Daniel C. M.; Narayan, Ramesh; Blackburn, Lindy; Doeleman, Sheperd S.; Johnson, Michael D.; Ma, Chung-Pei; Nagar, Neil M.; Natarajan, Priyamvada; Ricarte, Angelo

Published

2021

Language

EN