Radio Telescopes Capture Best-Ever Snapshot Of Black Hole Jets

[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

 



May 20, 2011

Trent Perrotto 
Headquarters, Washington      
202-358-0321 
trent.j.perrotto@xxxxxxxx 

Lynn Chandler 
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. 
301-286-2806      
lynn.chandler-1@xxxxxxxx   


RELEASE: 11-158

RADIO TELESCOPES CAPTURE BEST-EVER SNAPSHOT OF BLACK HOLE JETS

WASHINGTON -- An international team, including NASA-funded 
researchers, using radio telescopes located throughout the Southern 
Hemisphere has produced the most detailed image of particle jets 
erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy. 

"These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but 
we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain 
themselves," said Cornelia Mueller, the study's lead author and a 
doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. 

The new image shows a region less than 4.2 light-years across -- less 
than the distance between our sun and the nearest star. 
Radio-emitting features as small as 15 light-days can be seen, making 
this the highest-resolution view of galactic jets ever made. The 
study will appear in the June issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics and 
is available online. 

Mueller and her team targeted Centaurus A (Cen A), a nearby galaxy 
with a supermassive black hole weighing 55 million times the sun's 
mass. Also known as NGC 5128, Cen A is located about 12 million 
light-years away in the constellation Centaurus and is one of the 
first celestial radio sources identified with a galaxy. 

Seen in radio waves, Cen A is one of the biggest and brightest objects 
in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon. This is 
because the visible galaxy lies nestled between a pair of giant 
radio-emitting lobes, each nearly a million light-years long. 

These lobes are filled with matter streaming from particle jets near 
the galaxy's central black hole. Astronomers estimate that matter 
near the base of these jets races outward at about one-third the 
speed of light. 

Using an intercontinental array of nine radio telescopes, researchers 
for the TANAMI (Tracking Active Galactic Nuclei with Austral 
Milliarcsecond Interferometry) project were able to effectively zoom 
into the galaxy's innermost realm. 

"Advanced computer techniques allow us to combine data from the 
individual telescopes to yield images with the sharpness of a single 
giant telescope, one nearly as large as Earth itself," said Roopesh 
Ojha at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. 

The enormous energy output of galaxies like Cen A comes from gas 
falling toward a black hole weighing millions of times the sun's 
mass. Through processes not fully understood, some of this infalling 
matter is ejected in opposing jets at a substantial fraction of the 
speed of light. Detailed views of the jet's structure will help 
astronomers determine how they form. 

The jets strongly interact with surrounding gas, at times possibly 
changing a galaxy's rate of star formation. Jets play an important 
but poorly understood role in the formation and evolution of 
galaxies. NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected much 
higher-energy radiation from Cen A's central region. 

"This radiation is billions of times more energetic than the radio 
waves we detect, and exactly where it originates remains a mystery," 
said Matthias Kadler at the University of Wuerzburg in Germany and a 
collaborator of Ojha. "With TANAMI, we hope to probe the galaxy's 
innermost depths to find out." 

Ojha is funded through a Fermi investigation on multiwavelength 
studies of Active Galactic Nuclei. 

The astronomers credit continuing improvements in the Australian Long 
Baseline Array (LBA) with TANAMI's enormously increased image quality 
and resolution. The project augments the LBA with telescopes in South 
Africa, Chile and Antarctica to explore the brightest galactic jets 
in the southern sky. 

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle 
physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S. 
Department of Energy, along with important contributions from 
academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, 
Sweden and the U.S. The Australia Long Baseline Array is part of the 
Australia Telescope National Facility, which is funded by the 
Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility 
managed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research 
Organization. 

For more information and images, visit: 


http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/radio-particle-jets.html  
 

	
-end-



To subscribe to the list, send a message to: 
hqnews-subscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To remove your address from the list, send a message to:
hqnews-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

[Index of Archives]     [JPL News]     [Cassini News From Saturn]     [NASA Marshall Space Flight Center News]     [NASA Science News]     [James Web Space Telescope News]     [JPL Home]     [NASA KSC]     [NTSB]     [Deep Creek Hot Springs]     [Yosemite Discussion]     [NSF]     [Telescopes]

  Powered by Linux