Speaker
Description
In 2019 the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) delivered the first image of a black hole shadow in the center of the giant elliptical galaxy M87 and is expected to also produce high-resolution images of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Galaxy, Sgr A. The latter is more challenging to image, being a short time-scale variable source and affected by the interstellar scattering. An extension of the EHT will be needed to further improve the imaging capabilities and to produce reliable real-time movies of Sgr A and M87*. In this talk, we introduce the Africa Millimetre Telescope (AMT), planned to be built in Namibia, and show synthetic dynamical reconstructions (i.e. movies) produced with the current EHT array plus additional sites in Africa. The AMT alone will already increase the east-west uv-coverage of the current configuration significantly. This gives us the chance to reconstruct images within the first hours of the observation and at least double the observing time yielding robust imaging information. Finally, we discuss the impact of adding more telescopes on the African continent, such as on Canary Island, on imaging gas and light dynamics near the event horizon.
