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Astronomers focus on black hole 'jets'

GREENBELT, Md., May 20 (UPI) -- An international team of astronomers has made a detailed image of particle jets erupting from a black hole in a nearby galaxy, the U.S. space agency says.

Using radio telescopes positioned throughout the Southern Hemisphere, and combining X-ray, microwave and visible images of the galaxy Centaurus A, astronomers have created the highest-resolution view of galactic jets ever made, a NASA release reported Friday.

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"These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain themselves," said study lead author Cornelia Mueller, a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.

When observed in the radio wave spectrum, the galaxy is one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky because the visible galaxy lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting lobes, each nearly a million light-years long, that are filled with matter streaming from particle jets near the galaxy's central black hole.

Astronomers estimate that matter near the base of these jets is racing outward at nearly one-third the speed of light.

"Advanced computer techniques allow us to combine data from the individual telescopes to yield images with the sharpness of a single giant telescope, one nearly as large as Earth itself," said Roopesh Ojha at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

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