For the first time, a plasma jet from a black hole at the center of a radio galaxy has been imaged

Using a combination of measurements from a dozen radio telescopes scattered around the Earth and a space telescope, creating a virtual telescope larger than Earth, researchers have created images with unprecedented precision of plasma jets from a supermassive black hole.. Radio images taken by a combination of telescopes in space and on the ground produced an image of a structure of a plasma jet at a distance several hundred times the radius of the black hole, או 12 light days from their location of eruption

An international team of researchers has created an image with unprecedented precision of jets of gas not long ago formed from a massive black star. Radio images taken by a combination of space and ground-based telescopes produced an image of a plasma jet structure several hundreds of times the radius of the black hole, or 12 light-days away from their outburst location.

At the center of the massive galaxies are black holes whose weight is several billion times more than the mass of our Sun. It has long been known that some massive black stars emit jets of plasma at speeds close to the speed of light that can extend far beyond the boundaries of the galaxy from which they came. The mystery that remains is how the plasma jets are created in the first place. One of the difficulties in the study of jets is the inability of astronomers to create images of the structure of the jets at a distance close enough to their eruption site, so that it is difficult to compare observations with theoretical and computational models of jet formation.

Now an international team of researchers from eight countries has produced an extremely high angular resolution image of a jet created by a black hole at the center of the galaxy NGC 1275, also known as the radio source Perseus A, or 3C 84. The researchers were able to achieve a level of separation in the image that shows the jet at a distance from the black hole that is a tenth of what was previously possible with ground instruments only, and by doing so revealed details from the area where the jet was created with an unprecedented level of precision.

"The results were surprising. It turns out that the observed width of the jet was much wider than we expected according to the leading models today, at the point of eruption of the jet from the black hole's argosphere - a region in space near a rotating black hole where space itself is dragged into a circular motion around the black hole." Explains Professor Gabriele Giovannini (Prof Gabriele giovannini) from the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics, the lead author of the article published in Nature Astronomy.

"The results may indicate that at least the outer part of the jet comes out of the accretion disk that surrounds the black hole. Our results are not sufficient to disprove the current models that predict the jets will erupt from the argosphere, but we hope that they will give theorists insights into the structure of the jet at a distance close to the eruption site and hints at future development of the models" adds Dr. Tuomas Savolainen from Aalto University in Finland, Head of the RadioAstron viewing program that created the images.

Another result of the study is that the structure of the jets in NGC 1275 is fundamentally different from the jets in the nearby galaxy Messier 87, which is the only other jet structure imaged at the same small distance from the black hole. The researchers believe that the reason for this is the age of the two jets. "The jet in NGC 1275 was formed again only a little over ten years ago and is still in the process of forming a structure, a fact that provides us with a unique opportunity to observe the early stages of jet formation from a black hole. It is very important to continue the observation" explains another author of the article, Dr. Masanori Nakamura from the Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

The study of the inner region of NGC 1275 continues our binders of active galactic nuclei at the highest possible resolution. "Since the distance to the aforementioned galaxy is only 70 megafarsecs, or 230 million light-years, we can examine the structure of the jet with an unparalleled level of precision of a few hundred radii of the black hole, or 12 light-days," concludes Prof. Anton Zensus Zensus) director of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, and head of the VLBI research department, and is one of the authors of the article.

One radio telescope in space - a dozen on the ground

The significant improvement in the sharpness of the images was made possible by remembering the Earth-Earth-Space Interferometer RadioAstron, which consists of a 10-meter diameter radio telescope in orbit around the Earth and a collection of about two dozen of the world's largest ground-based radio telescopes. When the signals of individual telescopes are combined through the interference of radio waves, the array of telescopes has an angular resolution equivalent to the resolution of a telescope with a diameter of 350,000 km, almost the same as the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Hence, RadioAstron is the instrument with the highest angular resolution in the history of astronomy. The RadioAstron project is managed by the Astronomy and Space Center of the Lebedev Institute of Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and by the Lavochkin Science Organization, which operate under a contract with the state space corporation ROSCOSMOS, in cooperation with other organizations in Russia and other countries.

"We here at the RadioAstron project are happy that a unique combination of a space radio telescope made in Russia and a massive ground-based array of radio telescopes has allowed us to study the young relativistic jet in the vicinity of an extremely massive black hole," notes Prof. Yuri Kovalev from the Lebedev Institute in Moscow.

Translated by Uri Brock.

For the announcement of the researchers on the website of the Finnish Aalto University

for the scientific article

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• The strongest flash of light ever observed in space - probably the result of a star "falling" into a black hole
• For the first time - watching the entire process of a star being swallowed by a black hole until the plasma jets are emitted
• For the first time physicists predict the birth of a black hole