The view is a composite image based on data from three telescopes

Jul 18, 2012 11:49 GMT  ·  By
This is an artist’s impression of the quasar 3C 279, released by ESO today, July 18, 2012
   This is an artist’s impression of the quasar 3C 279, released by ESO today, July 18, 2012

By using telescopes in Arizona, Hawaii and Chile, a group of astronomers recently managed to capture an impressive image of a quasar, the distant nucleus of an active galaxy, which is powered by a supermassive black hole. This was made possible by the use of a technique called interferometry.

According to the team behind the new study, the instrument created from the three individual observatories sees the night sky 2 million times more precisely than the human eye. This is what enabled it to create a photo with a resolution of just 1 light-year.

This level of precision has never been achieved before. The galaxy targeted by the research is located in the constellation Virgo, and is home to the quasar 3C 279. The object shows up as extremely bright, most likely due to the massive amounts of materials its black hole consumes.

When dark behemoths feed, they do not gulp up matter directly. The harvested material comes together in a structure called the accretion disk, from which a narrow stream of matter steadily flows through the event horizon.

Within the disk, extreme friction is causing the material to become super-heated, and to release vast amounts of energetic radiations. Dedicated telescopes can observe these light signatures, and use them to gain more data on their host black hole, indirectly.

This is how the research team found out that this particular supermassive black hole, which is located around 5 billion light-years from Earth, tips the scales at around 1 billion solar masses. The discovery was announced earlier today, July 18.

Data on the quasar were collected using the European Space Observatory's (ESO) Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope, in Chile, the Submillimeter Array (SMA), in Hawaii, and the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT), in Arizona.

The study was conducted by an international team of researchers that featured experts from ESO, the Onsala Space Observatory and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in Germany. The imaging technique they used is called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI).

“The observations represent a new milestone towards imaging supermassive black holes and the regions around them,” ESO scientists said today.

“To make APEX ready for VLBI, scientists from Germany and Sweden installed new digital data acquisition systems, a very precise atomic clock, and pressurized data recorders capable of recording 4 gigabits per second for many hours under challenging environmental conditions,” they added.

“The data – 4 terabytes from each telescope – were shipped to Germany on hard drives and processed at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn,” the ESO team concluded.