Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy | 2018 Apr 03
A telescope larger than the Earth makes a sharp image of the formation of black hole jets in the core of a radio galaxy
An international team of researchers including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, has imaged newly forming jets of plasma from a massive black hole with unprecedented accuracy. Radio images made with a combination of telescopes in space and on the ground resolve the jet structure merely a couple of hundred black hole radii or 0.033 light years from its launching site. ...
- Artistic composition of the radio telescopes in space and on the ground observing NGC 1275, the central galaxy of the Perseus cluster of galaxies at a distance of 230 million light years. The obtained radio image shows a newly forming jet that is about 3 light years long. The details visible in the image are smaller than the Oort’s comet cloud around our Solar system. (Credit: Pier Raffaele Platania INAF/IRA (compilation); ASC, Lebedev Institute (RadioAstron Image))
Black holes weighing as much as several billion times the mass of our Sun are found at the centres of all massive galaxies. It has been known for long that some of these massive black holes eject spectacular jets where plasma flows out at speed close to the speed-of-light from the vicinity of the black hole and which can extend far beyond the confines of their host galaxy. How these jets form in the first place is a long-standing mystery. One of the main difficulties in studying them has been astronomers’ inability to image the structure of the jets driven by the black hole close enough to their launching site so that direct comparison to theoretical and computational models of jet formation would be possible.
An international team of researchers from eight different countries has now made ultra-high angular resolution images of the black hole jet in the centre of the giant galaxy NGC 1275, also known as radio source Perseus A or 3C 84. They were able to resolve the jet structure ten times closer to the black hole in NGC 1275 than what has been possible before with ground-based instruments – revealing unprecedented details of the jet formation region. ...
A Wide and Collimated Radio Jet in 3C 84 on the Scale of a Few Hundred Gravitational Radii - Gabriele Giovannini et al
- Nature Astronomy (online 02 Apr 2018) DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0431-2