| Space
Telescope Science Institute astronomers and their co-investigators have
gained their first glimpse of the mysterious region near a black hole at
the heart of a distant galaxy, where a powerful stream of subatomic particles
spewing outward at nearly the speed of light is formed into a beam, or jet,
that then goes nearly straight for thousands of light-years. The astronomers
used radio telescopes in Europe and the U.S., including the National Science
Foundation's (NSF) Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to make the most detailed
images ever of the center of the galaxy M87, some 50 million light-years
away. |
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This
radio image of the galaxy M87, taken with the Very Large Array (VLA) radio
telescope in February 1989, shows giant bubble-like structures where radio
emission is thought to be powered by the jets of subatomic particles coming
from the the galaxy's central black hole. The false color corresponds to
the intensity of the radio energy being emitted by the jet. M87 is located
50 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. |
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