By Ron Cowen
Astronomers have produced the sharpest images ever of twin jets racing outward from the vicinity of a galaxy’s central black hole.
Using the combined power of nine radio telescopes arrayed across the Southern Hemisphere, the images reveal features just 15 light-days across in the heart of the nearby galaxy Centaurus A, 12 million light-years away. At its core, the galaxy contains a black hole as massive as 55 million suns.
The new images home in on a region around the black hole less than 4.2 light-years across — smaller than the distance between the sun and its nearest star, says Roopesh Ojha of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Ojha and his colleagues describe their findings in the June Astronomy & Astrophysics.