This image of a distant radio galaxy is part of the Very Large Array Sky Survey – a seven-year campaign using the VLA to map eighty percent of the sky from New Mexico and generate a database of approximately 10 million radio sources. The image depicts massive radio jets blasting away from a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, which is seen as a faint dot between the two jets. The VLA Sky Survey continues to generate thousands of images at unprecedented resolution, revealing the details and stunning structure of extragalactic jets. If you want to look up where on the sky this image resides, the galaxy’s coordinates are: 14h 54m 27.8s, -36deg 39m 58.0s (J2000).
Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. While this may sound large, this ring is only about 40 microarcseconds across — equivalent to measuring the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon. Although the telescopes making up the EHT are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks — hydrogen masers — which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data – roughly 350 terabytes per day – which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.
VLA Image of Torus in Cygnus A
VLA image of the central region of the powerful radio galaxy Cygnus A, showing the doughnut-shaped torus surrounding the black hole and accretion disk.
Cannonball Pulsar
Observations using the Very Large Array (orange) reveal the needle-like trail of pulsar J0002+6216 outside the shell of its supernova remnant, shown in image from the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey. The pulsar escaped the remnant some 5,000 years after the supernova explosion.
ALMA Image of Young, Massive Binary Star System
ALMA image of the IRAS-07299 star-forming region and the massive binary system at its center. The background image shows dense, dusty streams of gas (shown in green) that appear to be flowing toward the center of the system. Gas that is moving toward us — as traced by the methanol molecule — is shown in blue; motions away from us in red. The inset image shows a zoom-in view of the massive forming binary, with the brighter, primary protostar moving toward us shown in blue and the fainter, secondary protostar moving away from us shown in red. The blue and red dotted lines show an example of orbits of the primary and secondary spiraling around their center of mass (marked by the cross).
ALMA Image of Salt in Orion Source I
ALMA image of the salty disk surrounding the young, massive star Orion Source I (blue ring). It is shown in relation to the Orion Molecular Cloud 1, a region of explosive starbirth. The background near infrared image was taken with the Gemini Observatory.