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Giant Telescope – 8x the Size of Earth – Reveals Unprecedented View of Colossal Cosmic Jet [scitechdaily.com]:

ByA telescope larger than the Earth has found a plasma rope in the Universe.

Using a network of radio telescopes on Earth and in space, astronomers have captured the most detailed view ever of a jet of plasma shooting from a supermassive black hole at the heart of a distant galaxy.

The jet, which comes from the heart of a distant blazar called 3C 279, travels at nearly the speed of light and shows complex, twisted patterns near its source. These patterns challenge the standard theory that has been used for 40 years to explain how these jets form and change over time.

A major contribution to the observations was made possible by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, where the data from all participating telescopes were combined to create a virtual telescope with an effective diameter of about 100,000 kilometers.

Their findings were recently published in Nature Astronomy.Insights into Blazars

Blazars are the brightest and most powerful sources of electromagnetic radiation in the cosmos. They are a subclass of active galactic nuclei comprising galaxies with a central supermassive black hole [scitechdaily.com] accreting matter from a surrounding disk. About 10% of active galactic nuclei, classified as quasars [scitechdaily.com], produce relativistic plasma jets. Bazars belong to a small fraction of quasars in which we can see these jets pointing almost directly at the observer.

Recently, a team of researchers including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany, has imaged the innermost region of the jet in the blazar 3C 279 at an unprecedented angular resolution and detected remarkably regular helical filaments which may require a revision of the theoretical models used until now for explaining the processes by which jets are produced in active galaxies.

“Thanks to RadioAstron, the space mission for which the orbiting radio telescope reached distances as far away as the Moon, and a network of twenty-three radio telescopes distributed across the Earth, we have obtained the highest-resolution image of the interior of a blazar to date, allowing us to observe the internal structure of the jet in such detail for the first time,” says Antonio Fuentes, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) in Granada, Spain, leading the work.Theoretical Implications and Challenges

The new window on the universe opened by the RadioAstron mission has revealed new details in the plasma jet of 3C 279, a blazar with a supermassive black hole at its core. The jet has at least two twisted filaments of plasma extending more than 570 light-years from the center.

“This is the first time we have seen such filaments so close to the jet’s origin, and they tell us more about how the black hole shapes the plasma. The inner jet was also observed by two other telescopes, the GMVA and the EHT, at much shorter wavelengths (3.5 mm and 1.3 mm), but they were unable to detect the filamentary shapes because they were too faint and too large for this resolution,” says Eduardo Ros, a member of the research team and European scheduler of the GMVA. “This shows how different telescopes can reveal different features of the same object,” he adds.

ByA telescope larger than the Earth has found a plasma rope in the Universe.

Using a network of radio telescopes on Earth and in space, astronomers have captured the most detailed view ever of a jet of plasma shooting from a supermassive black hole at the heart of a distant galaxy.

The jet, which comes from the heart of a distant blazar called 3C 279, travels at nearly the speed of light and shows complex, twisted patterns near its source. These patterns challenge the standard theory that has been used for 40 years to explain how these jets form and change over time.

A major contribution to the observations was made possible by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, where the data from all participating telescopes were combined to create a virtual telescope with an effective diameter of about 100,000 kilometers.

Their findings were recently published in Nature Astronomy.Insights into Blazars

Blazars are the brightest and most powerful sources of electromagnetic radiation in the cosmos. They are a subclass of active galactic nuclei comprising galaxies with a central supermassive black hole [scitechdaily.com] accreting matter from a surrounding disk. About 10% of active galactic nuclei, classified as quasars [scitechdaily.com], produce relativistic plasma jets. Bazars belong to a small fraction of quasars in which we can see these jets pointing almost directly at the observer.

Recently, a team of researchers including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany, has imaged the innermost region of the jet in the blazar 3C 279 at an unprecedented angular resolution and detected remarkably regular helical filaments which may require a revision of the theoretical models used until now for explaining the processes by which jets are produced in active galaxies.

“Thanks to RadioAstron, the space mission for which the orbiting radio telescope reached distances as far away as the Moon, and a network of twenty-three radio telescopes distributed across the Earth, we have obtained the highest-resolution image of the interior of a blazar to date, allowing us to observe the internal structure of the jet in such detail for the first time,” says Antonio Fuentes, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) in Granada, Spain, leading the work.Theoretical Implications and Challenges

The new window on the universe opened by the RadioAstron mission has revealed new details in the plasma jet of 3C 279, a blazar with a supermassive black hole at its core. The jet has at least two twisted filaments of plasma extending more than 570 light-years from the center.

“This is the first time we have seen such filaments so close to the jet’s origin, and they tell us more about how the black hole shapes the plasma. The inner jet was also observed by two other telescopes, the GMVA and the EHT, at much shorter wavelengths (3.5 mm and 1.3 mm), but they were unable to detect the filamentary shapes because they were too faint and too large for this resolution,” says Eduardo Ros, a member of the research team and European scheduler of the GMVA. “This shows how different telescopes can reveal different features of the same object,” he adds.

where-will-you-put-it? dept.

Journal Reference:
Fuentes, Antonio, Gómez, José L., Martí, José M., et al. Filamentary structures as the origin of blazar jet radio variability, Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-023-02105-7 [doi.org])

Original Submission