CHICAGO (Reuters) - Using powerful radio telescopes, scientists have captured a supermassive black hole just as it was belching out a jet of supercharged particles, offering a first look at how these cosmic jets are formed, they said on Wednesday. Supermassive black holes form the core of many galaxies and astronomers have long believed they were responsible for ejecting jets of particles at nearly the speed of light.
But just how they did it had remained a mystery.
An international team of researchers led by Alan Marscher of Boston University just got its first peek.
Marscher's team aimed the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Long Baseline Array -- a system of 10 radio telescopes -- at the galaxy BL Lacertae.
A kind of supermassive black hole known as a blazar was suspected of spewing out a pair of forceful streams of plasma some 950 million light years from Earth.
A light year, the distance light travels in a year, is about 6 trillion miles.
What they saw was a close up of this charged material winding in corkscrew fashion out of the supermassive black hole, behaving just as astronomers had predicted.Full story here: http://uk.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUKN2338757920080423?sp=true
-Ryan
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