A new array of radio telescopes has captured its first images, showing a huge jet blasting away from a galaxy with a powerful black hole at its heart.
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| This is a wide-field composite e-Merlin (radio) and Hubble Space Telescope (optical) image of the Double Quasar. The lensed quasar images are visible as the two bright objects, one above the other. The radio emission seen by e-Merlin is produced by the central black hole in both lensed images. The image also shows radio emission thought to be associated with the black hole at the centre of the lensing galaxy (just above the lower quasar image) and the radio jet arcing away from the upper quasar image. Credit: Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester |
The images, taken by the e-Merlin telescope array in the United Kingdom, depict a jet of radio emissions arcing away from a distant quasar 9 billion light-years from Earth. Quasars — the central regions of galaxies dominated by energy-spewing supermassive black holes — are some of the brightest objects in the universe.
This particular object is known as the “Double Quasar,” because its light gets bent around a foreground galaxy — one closer to Earth — by the curvature of space. This warping of space results in a “gravitational lens” that produces multiple, magnified images of the same quasar, scientists said. [New image of the Double Quasar]
The foreground galaxy responsible for the lensing effect is also visible in some of the new images, just above the lower quasar. The radio light seen in the e-Merlin image suggests that this galaxy, too, harbors a black hole, albeit somewhat smaller.
“This first image of the Double Quasar clearly demonstrates how useful e-Merlin is going to be in our studies of gravitational lenses,” Neal Jackson of the University of Manchester said in a statement. “By mapping the bending of light by mass, we will be able to study the way in which both stars and dark matter are distributed in galaxies and how this changes as the universe evolves.”
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