Hierarchical Interferometric Bayesian Imaging

Abstract Very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) achieves the highest angular resolution in astronomy. VLBI measures corrupted Fourier components, known as visibilities. Reconstructing on-sky images from these visibilities is a challenging inverse problem, particularly for sparse arrays such as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and the Very Long Baseline Array, where incomplete sampling and severe calibration errors introduce significant uncertainty in the image. To help guide convergence and control the uncertainty in image reconstructions, regularization on the space of images is utilized, such as enforcing smoothness or similarity to a fiducial image. Coupled with this regularization is the introduction of a new set of parameters that modulate its strength. We present a hierarchical Bayesian imaging approach (hierarchical interferometric Bayesian Imaging, HIBI) that enables the quantification of uncertainty for all parameters. Incorporating instrumental effects within HIBI is straightforward, allowing for simultaneous imaging and calibration of data. To showcase HIBI’s effectiveness and flexibility, we build a simple imaging model based on Markov random fields and demonstrate how different physical components can be included, e.g., black hole shadow size, and their uncertainties can be inferred. For example, while the original EHT publications were unable to constrain the ring width of M87*, HIBI measures a width of 9.3 ± 1.3 μ as. We apply HIBI to image and calibrate EHT synthetic data, real EHT observations of M87*, and multifrequency observations of OJ 287. Across these tests, HIBI accurately recovers a wide variety of image structures and quantifies their uncertainties. HIBI is publicly available in the Comrade VLBI software repository.