Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array of radio telescopes have discovered a cloud of gas apparently being struck by a jet of ultrafast particles powered by the energy of a supermassive black hole at the core of a galaxy 450 million light-years away.

At a ceremony last Friday, August 25 in which the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope was formally dedicated, U.S. Senator Robert C Byrd announced that the gigantic telescope had successfully opened its two-acre ‘eye’ on the Universe earlier that week.

The last of 2,004 aluminum surface panels was recently installed on the GBT’s two-acre (100 m x 110 m) collecting dish. The telescope is located at NRAO’s Green Bank site, in rural Pocahontas County, West Virginia.

In Socorro, New Mexico, the observatory will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its famed Very Large Array (VLA), and in Green Bank, West Virginia, officials will formally dedicate the new Green Bank Telescope (GBT), the world’s largest fully-steerable dish antenna.

On August 23, scientists will mark the 20th anniversary of the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array, the most powerful, flexible and widely-used radio telescope in the world.

Pulsars, those spinning, superdense neutron stars that send powerful lighthouse beams of radio waves and light flashing through the Universe, have been lying about their ages.