Astronomy magazine recently published an article about the unprecedented images of a plasma jet from a supermassive black hole in the blazar 3C 279, challenging existing theories. The images reveal complex patterns that were captured with the help of advanced radio telescope networks.
The international effort, which utilized advanced radio telescope networks, discovered helical filaments near the jet’s source, indicating the potential role of magnetic fields in shaping such jets. This is a significant breakthrough for astronomers, as it challenges existing theories about how these jets form and change over time.
The team responsible for the observations was composed of researchers from around the world, including the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, which played a major role in combining the data from all participating telescopes to create a virtual telescope with an effective diameter of about 100,000 kilometers.
The findings, which were recently published in Nature Astronomy, shed new light on blazars, which are the brightest and most powerful sources of electromagnetic radiation in the cosmos. Blazars are a subclass of active galactic nuclei comprising galaxies with a central supermassive black hole accreting matter from a surrounding disk.
The new images obtained by the researchers highlight the presence of remarkably regular helical filaments, challenging the standard theory that has been used for 40 years to explain how these jets form and change over time.
According to Antonio Fuentes, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) in Granada, Spain, leading the work, the study of the inner jet in 3C 279 is an ongoing effort to better understand the role of magnetic fields in the initial formation of relativistic outflows from active galactic nuclei.
The recent observations made by RadioAstron, the space mission for which the orbiting radio telescope reached distances as far away as the Moon, and a network of twenty-three radio telescopes distributed across the Earth, have provided the highest-resolution image of the interior of a blazar to date, allowing scientists to observe the internal structure of the jet in such detail for the first time.
The study has also revealed the presence of a helical magnetic field that confines the jet, indicating that it could be the magnetic field that directs and guides the jet’s plasma moving at a speed of 0.997 times the speed of light.
The groundbreaking observations were made possible by international scientific collaboration between observatories and scientists from many countries, including the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and the Astro Space Center of the Lebedev Physical Institute. The mission took decades of joint planning before the satellite’s launch, and making the actual images became possible by connecting large telescopes on the ground and analyzing the data in a VLBI correlation center in Bonn.