| 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
Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio image of the region close to the black
hole, where an extragalactic jet is formed into a narrow beam by magnetic
fields. The false color corresponds to the intensity of the radio energy
being emitted by the jet. The red region is about 1/10 light-year across.
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