| 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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A
visible light image of the giant elliptical galaxy M87, taken with NASA
Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in February 1998,
reveals a brilliant jet of high-speed electrons emitted from the nucleus
(diagonal line across image). The jet is produced by a 3-billion-solar-mass
black hole. |
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