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posted by janrinok on Wednesday July 21 2021, @01:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the Centarus-A dept.

"Active" galaxies are interesting. So are global telescopes. Story at Science Mag.

The astronomy team that 2 years ago captured the first close-up of a giant black hole, lurking at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87), has now zoomed in on a second, somewhat smaller giant in the nearby active galaxy Centaurus A. The Event Horizon Telescope's (EHT's) latest image should help resolve questions about how such galactic centers funnel huge amounts of matter into powerful beams and fire them thousands of light-years into space. Together the images also support theorists' belief that all black holes operate the same way, despite huge variations in their masses.

"This is really nice," astronomer Philip Best of the University of Edinburgh says of the new EHT image. "The angular resolution is astonishing compared to previous images of these jets."

The EHT merges dozens of widely dispersed radio dishes, from Hawaii to France and from Greenland to the South Pole, into a huge virtual telescope. By pointing a large number of dishes at a celestial object at the same time and carefully time stamping the data from each one with an atomic clock, researchers can later reassemble it with massive computing clusters—a process that takes years—to produce an image with a resolution as sharp as that of a single Earth-size dish. One challenge is getting observing time on 11 different observatories simultaneously, so the EHT only operates for a few weeks each year; poor weather and technical glitches often further narrow that window.

The virtual telescope probed Centaurus A during the same 2017 observing campaign that produced the now-famous image of the supermassive black hole in M87—Science's Breakthrough of the Year for 2019. Centaurus A, about 13 million light-years away, is one of the closest galaxies to Earth that is bright at radio wavelengths. It also has obvious jets spewing matter above and below the galactic disk, a hallmark of an active giant black hole. "We wanted to see what the jet looked like at the resolution" EHT could offer, says team member Michael Janssen of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. "We didn't know what to expect."

The result, which he and colleagues report today in Nature Astronomy, was a detailed image of how the jet emerges from the region around Centaurus A's supermassive black hole, showing a remarkable similarity to EHT's images of M87's jet on a much smaller scale. Images of Centaurus A's jets taken by other telescopes at different wavelengths revealed little detail, but the EHT images show the jet with a dark center flanked by two bright stripes; Best suggests the jet may appear bright around its edge because its outer regions rub against surrounding gas and dust, causing them to glow.

[...] The Event Horizon Telescope has produced detailed images of the beams of matter from Centaurus A's center, revealing the jets have a dark center paralleled by glowing edges.
M. Janssen, Nature Astronomy (2021) 10.1038

doi:10.1126/science.abl5226


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @10:43PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @10:43PM (#1158937)

    My mind is blown. How far would I need to push out my finger before it got this small?

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @10:50PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @10:50PM (#1158940)

    OK, so I did the math, and this is roughly how big your finger appears if you put it on mercury. My mind remains blown.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 22 2021, @02:22AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 22 2021, @02:22AM (#1158995)

      If you take your finger to be 1-cm wide, I calculate about 417,000 km away, so about the distance to the Moon.

      1 arcsec = 4.8 microradians, so 50 arcsec = 0.24 mrad, so 50 microarcsec = 2.4e-10 rad

      So for a 1-cm finger = 0.01 m finger, I get the distance to be D = 0.1 / 2.4e-10 = 4.17e8 m = 417,000 km