• Something is Lurking in the Heart of Quasar 3C 279 (Max Planck Institute)

The most exciting announcement was a surprise release from the Event Horizon Telescope. Last year they brought us a fabulous image of light twisting around the SMBH in the M87 Galaxy. Today they shared images of the Quasar 3C 279 that were taken in April 2017. With this significantly more distant system, their goal wasn’t to resolve the area around the galaxy’s black hole; instead they were simply using this distant source to calibrate their systems, and along the way they accomplished some cool science. 

3C279 was discovered in 1973 to have superliminal jets, jets that thanks to their alignment toward and away from us and the time it takes light to travel, appear to be moving apart at faster than the speed of light. They aren’t, this is just a cool illusion. In EHT’s calibration images, the team was able to resolve features 20 micro arc-seconds thanks to the massive spread of their telescopes. This corresponded to features less than a light year across. By combining data from radio telescopes all across the planet, they synthesized a telescope the size of our planet. Over the several days of the teams observations, they could see details around the jets slowly change, presumably due to the rotation of the accretion disk around the black hole and the shredding and infall of material. Unexpectedly, in these super high resolution images they discovered the jets had an unexpected twist in their shape. This is super weird, and paper lead author Jae-Young Kim describes it this way: “Here, where we expected to find the region where the jet forms by going to the sharpest image possible, we fins a kind of perpendicular structure, This is like finding a very different shape by opening the smallest Matryoshka Doll.” What I particularly love about this is they discovered cool new science while just trying to calibrate their data on other sources, once again proving that one person’s trash is another person’s science. These results appear in the latest issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics.