Supermassive black hole seen spinning ropes of plasma like a cosmic spider.
Astronomers have captured the most detailed image yet of a supermassive black hole spinning a jet of plasma into a twisted rope and blasting it out at near-light speed. The image, taken with a network of radio telescopes, shows the jet twisting and contorting in a way that was not previously thought possible.
The jet is being ejected from a blazar, a type of active galactic nucleus (AGN) that is pointed directly at Earth. Blazars are powered by supermassive black holes that are actively feeding on matter. As the matter falls into the black hole, it is heated to extreme temperatures and ejected in the form of jets of plasma.
The new image of the blazar 3C 279 shows that the jet is not a simple straight stream of plasma, but rather a complex, twisted rope. The jet also appears to be precessing, or wobbling, like a top.
"This is the first time we have seen such a detailed image of a blazar jet," said lead author Dr. José Luis Gómez of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain. "The image shows that the jet is much more complex than we thought. It is twisted and precessing, and it is interacting with the surrounding gas in a very complex way."
The new image is challenging current theories of how blazar jets are formed and how they evolve over time. Scientists are now working to develop new models that can explain the complex structure and dynamics of the jet in 3C 279.
The discovery could have important implications for our understanding of black holes and AGNs. AGNs are thought to be the driving force behind the evolution of galaxies, and so understanding how they work is essential to understanding the evolution of the universe as a whole.
The new image was taken with the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a network of 10 radio telescopes scattered across the United States. The VLBA has a resolving power that is equivalent to that of a single telescope the size of the Earth. This makes it possible to image objects in the distant universe with unprecedented detail.