How Spatially Resolved Polarimetry Informs Black Hole Accretion Flow Models

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has successfully produced images of two supermassive black holes, enabling novel tests of black holes and their accretion flows on horizon scales. The EHT has so far published total intensity and linear polarization images, while upcoming images may include circular polarization, rotation measure, and spectral index, each of which reveals different aspects of the plasma and space-time. The next-generation EHT (ngEHT) will greatly enhance these studies through wider recorded bandwidths and additional stations, leading to greater signal-to-noise, orders of magnitude improvement in dynamic range, multi-frequency observations, and horizon-scale movies. In this paper, we review how each of these different observables informs us about the underlying properties of the plasma and the spacetime, and we discuss why polarimetric studies are well-suited to measurements with sparse, long-baseline coverage.

Automated summary

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration successfully captured images of two supermassive black holes, providing new tests of black holes and their accretion flows on horizon scales. The current EHT has released total intensity and linear polarization images, while upcoming images may include circular polarization, rotation measure, and spectral index, revealing different aspects of the plasma and space-time. The future ngEHT will greatly improve these studies through wider bandwidths, additional stations, and other enhancements.