The Black Hole Explorer (BHEX) is a space-VLBI mission that will extend the Event Horizon Telescope into space. The cryogenic receivers must be cooled down to 4.5K. A cryogenic system consisting of two Stirling cryocoolers and a Joule-Thomson cooler has...
We present a baseline science operations plan for the Black Hole Explorer (BHEX), a space mission concept aiming to confirm the existence of the predicted sharp “photon ring” resulting from strongly lensed photon trajectories around black holes, as...
We present the motivation and vision for the Black Hole Explorer (BHEX), a mission that will extend submillimeter Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) to space. BHEX, currently under formulation for a NASA Small Explorer mission, will discover and...
The Black Hole Explorer (BHEX), is an orbiting, multi-band, millimeter radio-telescope, in hybrid combination with millimeter terrestrial radio-telescopes, designed to discover and measure the thin photon ring around the supermassive black holes M87* and...
The Black Hole Explorer (BHEX) is a next-generation space very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) mission concept that will extend the ground-based Event Horizon Telescope into space. The Japanese community is poised to make major contributions to the...
The Black Hole Explorer: (BHEX) is a space mission to image radio emissions of black holes by expanding both the baseline and time resolution of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). This involves integrating a space telescope into an array of ground...
The photon ring is a narrow ring-shaped feature (predicted by general relativity, but not yet observed) that appears in black hole images. It is caused by the extreme bending of light within a few Schwarzschild radii of the event horizon and provides a...
Black holes would seem impossible to visualize: they emit no light and reflect none. They have an event horizon, which, in a rigorous sense, marks the edge of the universe. Despite this, in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) directly imaged the...
