Hubble films of movie of a jet firing from a black hole
Cool image time! Using images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over the past two decades astronomers have assembled a movie of the motion of blobs, ejected by a jet from a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy.
The jet from NGC 3862 has a string-of-pearls structure of glowing knots of material. Taking advantage of Hubble’s sharp resolution and long-term optical stability, Eileen Meyer of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, matched archival Hubble images with a new, deep image taken in 2014 to better understand jet motions. Meyer was surprised to see a fast knot with an apparent speed of seven times the speed of light catch up with the end of a slower moving, but still superluminal, knot along the string. The resulting “shock collision” caused the merging blobs to brighten significantly.
The movie is below the fold.
» Read more
Cool image time! Using images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over the past two decades astronomers have assembled a movie of the motion of blobs, ejected by a jet from a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy.
The jet from NGC 3862 has a string-of-pearls structure of glowing knots of material. Taking advantage of Hubble’s sharp resolution and long-term optical stability, Eileen Meyer of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, matched archival Hubble images with a new, deep image taken in 2014 to better understand jet motions. Meyer was surprised to see a fast knot with an apparent speed of seven times the speed of light catch up with the end of a slower moving, but still superluminal, knot along the string. The resulting “shock collision” caused the merging blobs to brighten significantly.
The movie is below the fold.
» Read more