The Present and Future of the Event Horizon Telescope

Britton Jeter^1*, Hung-Yi Pu², Keiichi Asada¹, Satoki Matsushita¹, Cheng-Yu Kuo³, Ming-Tan Chen¹, Cristina Romero-Cañizales¹, Chih-Wei Locutus Huang¹, Geoffrey Bower¹

¹Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
²Department of Physics, NTNU, Taipei, Taiwan
³Department of Physics, NSYSU, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

* Presenter:Britton Jeter, email:bjeter@asiaa.sinica.edu.tw

The Event Horizon Telescope has achieved its primary goal of imaging the shadows of supermassive black holes, but there remains a tremendous amount of science that can be discovered from ultra-high resolution observations of black hole systems. On behalf of the EHT, I will discuss the collaboration's new goals for the next few years. Through the addition of new telescope sites, technical improvements to VLBI hardware, and new advances in analysis techniques, the EHT will investigate the nature of jet launching through high-dynamic range movies of the black hole and jet in M87*, produce careful studies of flaring at the horizon-scale in Sgr A*, learn about energy conversion and extraction around black holes through detailed characterization of the magnetic fields in both systems, and measure the spacetime properties of supermassive black holes with greater precision.

Keywords: Supermassive Black Holes, Very Long Baseline Interferometry, Relativistic Jets, Magnetic Fields, Active Galactic Nuclei