(ORDO NEWS) — EHT radio telescopes examined the vicinity of a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy located 7.5 billion light-years away.
The global EHT network includes radio telescopes operating on different continents.
By combining their observations, scientists are exploring the most extreme objects in the universe, such as supermassive black holes.
Earlier, the EHT collaboration presented images of Sagittarius A*, a compact radio source at the center of our Galaxy, which is such a hole surrounded by a cloud of hot matter.
In addition, the EHT explored the core of the galaxy M87, 55 million light-years away.
Now, the EHT has made it possible to see a much more distant target – the quasar NRAO 530.
“The light that we saw traveled 7.5 billion light years through the expanding Universe, but thanks to the power of the EHT, we were able to see details on the scale of one light year,” the authors say . work.
Quasar NRAO 530 is an active galactic nucleus, including a supermassive black hole and a disk of matter falling into it, which twists, accelerates and heats up to enormous temperatures, radiating in different wavelengths.
Part of this matter is ejected from the poles of the quasar in narrow streams, in the form of relativistic jets, which scatter at speeds close to the speed of light.
Such compact quasars with jets directed towards the observer are called blazars.
In addition, NRAO 530 is characterized by strong radiation fluctuations in the optical range, which makes it possible to attribute it to a relatively rare group of optically active quasars.
New observations of NRAO 530 by the EHT radio telescopes were made back in April 2017, and since then the collected data have been processed.
The resulting images show the core of the quasar, radiating brightly in the millimeter wave range. It is here that its jets are born, leaving at a distance of at least 1.7 light years.
Under the influence of magnetic fields, they acquire polarization, and astronomers were able to determine it in different parts of the jets.
These data showed that the magnetic field of the jets is highly ordered and has a helical structure.
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