Photo credit: Radbound University / ESO
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which merges dozens of widely dispersed radio dishes, from Hawaii to Greenland and the South Pole, has captured a breathtaking image of a black hole jet in Centaurus A. The massive virtual telescope essentially points a large number of dishes at a celestial object at the same time and carefully time stamps the data from each one with an atomic clock. Researchers later reassemble it with giant computing clusters. Read more for a video and additional information.
Astronomers have studied Centaurus A extensively across the entire electromagnetic spectrum by a variety of radio, infrared, optical, X-ray and gamma-ray observatories. At its center lies a black hole with the mass of 55 million suns, and compared to all previous high-resolution observations, the jet from this object has now been imaged at a tenfold higher frequency and sixteen times sharper resolution.
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This is really nice. The angular resolution is astonishing compared to previous images of these jets. This allows us for the first time to see and study an extragalactic radio jet on scales smaller than the distance light travels in one day. We see up close and personally how a monstrously gigantic jet launched by a supermassive black hole is being born,” said Philip Best, astronomer at the University of Edinburgh.