Image credit: Gomez, et al., Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF.Using an orbiting radio-astronomy satellite combined with 15 ground-based radio telescopes, astronomers have made the highest-resolution, or most-detailed, astronomical image yet, revealing new insights about a gorging black hole in a galaxy 900 million light-years from Earth. The scientists combined signals from the Spektr-R satellite of the RadioAstron mission with those from radio telescopes throughout Europe and nine antennas of the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). The result was an image with the resolving power of a telescope about 62,500 miles wide, or almost eight times the diameter of the Earth.Image credit: Gomez, et al., A. Lobanov.The image shows radio emission coming from a jet of particles accelerated to speeds nearly that of light by the gravitational power of a supermassive black hole at the core of a galaxy called BL Lacerate. The jet shown by this image would fit within the outer extent of our solar system, marked by the Oort Cloud of cometary objects that reside far beyond the familiar planets. The image shows detail roughly equivalent to seeing a 50-cent coin (or a British £2 coin) on the Moon. The image appears elongated because the distance between the satellite and the ground telescopes is so much greater than that among the ground telescopes themselves, providing greater resolving power in one direction. In this version, resolution in the orthogonal direction is exaggerated to compensate.
The satellite project is led by the Astro Space Center in Moscow, and the data from all 15 telescopes were combined at a facility of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. The scientists are reporting on their work in the Astrophysical Journal.
Using new images that show unprecedented detail, scientists have found that material rotating around a very young protostar probably has dragged in and twisted magnetic fields from the larger area surrounding the star. The discovery, made with the Very Large Array radio telescope, has important implications for how dusty discs — the raw material for planet formation — grow around young stars.
Astronomers using the super-sharp radio vision of the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) have found the shredded remains of a galaxy that passed through a larger galaxy, leaving only the smaller galaxy’s nearly-naked supermassive black hole to emerge and speed away at more than 2,000 miles per second.
Dark matter, the mysterious substance that constitutes most of the material universe, remains as elusive as ever. Although experiments on the ground and in space have yet to find a trace of dark matter, six or more years of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has broadened the mission’s dark matter hunt using some novel approaches.