MPIfR: Something is Lurking in the Heart of Quasar 3C 279
Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2020 4:53 pm
Something is Lurking in the Heart of Quasar 3C 279
Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy | 2020 Apr 07
Something is Lurking in the Heart of Quasar 3C 279
Event Horizon Telescope | 2020 Apr 07
Event Horizon Telescope Imaging of the Archetypal Blazar 3C 279
at an Extreme 20 Microarcsecond Resolution ~ Jae-Young Kim et al
viewtopic.php?t=29115
Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy | 2020 Apr 07
First Event Horizon Telescope Images of a Black-Hole Powered Jet
One year ago the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration published the first image of a black hole in the nearby radio galaxy M 87. Now the collaboration has extracted new information from the EHT data of the far quasar 3C 279: they observed the finest detail ever in the relativistic jet that is believed to originate from the vicinity of a supermassive black hole. In their analysis ... they studied the jet’s fine-scale morphology close to the jet base where highly variable gamma-ray emission is thought to originate. The technique used for observing the jet is called very long baseline interferometry (VLBI). ...
The EHT collaboration continues extracting information from the exquisite data collected in its global campaign in April 2017. Target of the observations was the quasar 3C 279, a galaxy in the constellation Virgo that scientists classify as a quasar because a point of light at its center shines ultra-bright and flickers as massive amounts of gases and stars fall into the giant black hole there. The black hole is about one billion times the mass of the sun. It is shredding the gas and stars that come near into an inferred accretion disk and we see it is squirting some of the gas back out in two fine fire-hose-like jets of plasma at speeds near the speed of light. This tells of enormous forces at play in the center.
Now, the linked-up telescopes show the sharpest-ever details, down to a resolution finer than half a light-year, to better see the jet down to the expected accretion disk and to see the jet and disk in action. The newly analyzed data show the normally straight jet has an unexpected twisted shape at its base and for the first time we see features perpendicular to the jet, which first could be interpreted as the accretion disk from where jets are ejected from the poles. Comparing the images over subsequent days, we see them change in their finest details, probing jet ejection, changes that previously were seen only in numerical simulations. ...
Something is Lurking in the Heart of Quasar 3C 279
Event Horizon Telescope | 2020 Apr 07
Event Horizon Telescope Imaging of the Archetypal Blazar 3C 279
at an Extreme 20 Microarcsecond Resolution ~ Jae-Young Kim et al
- Astronomy & Astrophysics (accepted 03 Apr 2020) DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202037493 (preprint)
viewtopic.php?t=29115