Advanced VLBI Imaging

Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) is an observational technique developed in astronomy for combining multiple radio telescopes into a single virtual instrument with an effective aperture reaching up to many thousand kilometers and enabling measurements at highest angular resolutions. The celebrated examples of applying VLBI to astrophysical studies include detailed, high-resolution images of the innermost parts of relativistic outflows (jets) in active galactic nuclei (AGN) and recent pioneering observations of the shadows of supermassive black holes (SMBH) in the center of our Galaxy and in the galaxy M87. Despite these and many other proven successes of VLBI, analysis and imaging of VLBI data still remain difficult, owing in part to the fact that VLBI imaging inherently constitutes an ill-posed inverse problem. Historically, this problem has been addressed in radio interferometry by the CLEAN algorithm, a matching-pursuit inverse modeling method developed in the early 1970-s and since then established as a de-facto standard approach for imaging VLBI data. In recent years, the constantly increasing demand for improving quality and fidelity of interferometric image reconstruction has resulted in several attempts to employ new approaches, such as forward modeling and Bayesian estimation, for application to VLBI imaging. While the current state-of-the-art forward modeling and Bayesian techniques may outperform CLEAN in terms of accuracy, resolution, robustness, and adaptability, they also tend to require more complex structure and longer computation times, and rely on extensive finetuning of a larger number of non-trivial hyperparameters. This leaves an ample room for further searches for potentially more effective imaging approaches and provides the main motivation for this dissertation and its particular focusing on the need to unify algorithmic frameworks and to study VLBI imaging from the perspective of inverse problems in general. In pursuit of this goal, and based on an extensive qualitative comparison of the existing methods, this dissertation comprises the development, testing, and first implementations of two novel concepts for improved interferometric image reconstruction. The concepts combine the known benefits of current forward modeling techniques, develop more automatic and less supervised algorithms for image reconstruction, and realize them within two different frameworks. The first framework unites multiscale imaging algorithms in the spirit of compressive sensing with a dictionary adapted to the uv-coverage and its defects (DoG-HiT, DoB-CLEAN). We extend this approach to dynamical imaging and polarimetric imaging. The core components of this framework are realized in a multidisciplinary and multipurpose software MrBeam, developed as part of this dissertation. The second framework employs a multiobjective genetic evolutionary algorithm (MOEA/D) for the purpose of achieving fully unsupervised image reconstruction and hyperparameter optimization. These new methods are shown to outperform the existing methods in various metrics such as angular resolution, structural sensitivity, and degree of supervision. We demonstrate the great potential of these new techniques with selected applications to frontline VLBI observations of AGN jets and SMBH. In addition to improving the quality and robustness of image reconstruction, DoG-HiT, DoB-CLEAN and MOEA/D also provide such novel capabilities as dynamic reconstruction of polarimetric images on minute time-scales, or near-real time and unsupervised data analysis (useful in particular for application to large imaging surveys). The techniques and software developed in this dissertation are of interest for a wider range of inverse problems as well. This includes such versatile fields such as Ly-alpha tomography (where we improve estimates of the thermal state of the intergalactic medium), the cosmographic search for dark matter (where we improve forecasted bounds on ultralight dilatons), medical imaging, and solar spectroscopy