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Mandatory Credit: Photo by NASA/Capella Observatory et al. / Rex Features ( 1327082d )
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Radio Telescopes Capture Best-Ever Snapshot of Black Hole Jets
This is the most detailed image ever taken of particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy.
An international team, including NASA-funded researchers, used radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere to produced the jaw-dropping image.
"These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain themselves," said Cornelia Mueller, the study's lead author and a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.
The new image shows a region less than 4.2 light-years across - less than the distance between our sun and the nearest star. Radio-emitting features as small as 15 light-days can be seen, making this the highest-resolution view of galactic jets ever made.
Mueller and her team targeted Centaurus A (Cen A), a nearby galaxy with a supermassive black hole weighing 55 million times the sun's mass. Also known as NGC 5128, Cen A is located about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus and is one of the first celestial radio sources identified with a galaxy.
Seen in radio waves, Cen A is one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon. This is because the visible galaxy lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting lobes, each nearly a million light-years long.
These lobes are filled with matter streaming from particle jets near the galaxy's central black hole. Astronomers estimate that matter near the base of these jets races outward at about one-third the speed of light.
Using an intercontinental array of nine radio telescopes, researchers for the TANAMI (Tracking Active Galactic Nuclei with Austral Millia...
For more information visit http://www.rexfeatures.com/stacklink/QSIUNIGJF
2011-05-23
NASA/Capella Observatory et al. /EAST NEWS
Rex Features
NASA/Capella Observatory et al.
Rex_BEST_EVER_BLAC_1327082D
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