Radio telescopes capture best-ever snapshot of black hole jets

Astronomy : The highest-resolution image of galactic jets has been produced by the Tracking Active Galactic Nuclei with Austral Milliarcsecond Interferometry (TANAMI) project. The new image shows a region less than 4.2 light-years across, and radio-emitting features as small as 15 light-days are visible. Using an international array of nine radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere, researchers for the TANAMI project combined the data from each one into a large, highly detailed image of Centaurus A, also known as NGC 5128, a nearby galaxy with a supermassive black hole. It’s one of the brightest objects in the sky when seen in radio waves; this is because the visible part of the galaxy sits between two radio-emitting lobes, each nearly one million light-years long, that are filled with matter streaming from particle jets near the black hole. The jets are formed when some of the matter falling into the black hole is ejected at about one-third the speed of light. They may change the rate of star formation within a galaxy, thus playing an important role in galactic evolution.