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Space Telescope Captures Most Detailed Quasar Images Ever
By Andrew Bridges
Chief PasadenaCorrespondent
posted: 09:17 am ET
13 January 2000
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quasar_images_000113PASADENA, Calif. - A space-based observatory project launched just three years ago has given astronomers the closest look yet at quasars, including finely resolved images of radio jets being ejected from the black holes that power them. Astronomers from around the world will present the latest quasar images next month at a meeting outside Tokyo at Japans Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, which manages the Very Long Baseline Interferometry space observatory. The images are the most detailed ever made of quasars, or quasi-stellar radio sources: enormously bright objects thought to radiate outward from disks of material as they spiral into black holes. The Space VLBI project has at its heart Halca, a Japanese-built radio telescope now in orbit around Earth. The telescope, launched in 1997, can be paired with any one of about 40 ground-based radio telescopes scattered among 15 countries to form a single virtual telescope more than 2.5 times the diameter of Earth. When the two radio antennas act in concert, the extremely long baseline -- up to 20,000 miles (32,000 km) - makes the resulting instruments resolution 1,000 times better than the best optical telescopes. The resulting view of the universe is among the sharpest available to astronomers. The resolving capability also allows them to peer backward in time to view radio emissions that have taken billions of light years to travel across space to Earth. "These images probe some of the most distant, ancient and energetic objects in the universe, giving us a glimpse of quasars as they existed billions of years ago," said Robert Preston, U.S. Space VLBI project scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The new images show individual components making up the quasars jets, including the image above from the galaxy Virgo A. The meeting at Japans ISAS will take place from Jan. 19-21. It is expected to draw some 70 scientists.
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