Astronomers have obtained unprecedented images of a plasma jet from a supermassive black hole in blazar 3C 279, revealing complex patterns that challenge existing theories. This international effort, utilizing advanced radio telescope networks, has discovered helical filaments near the jet’s source, indicating the potential role of magnetic fields in shaping such jets. (Artist’s concept.)
A telescope larger than the Earth has found a plasma rope in the Universe.
Using a network of radio telescopes on Earth and in space, astronomers have captured the most detailed view ever of a jet of plasma shooting from a supermassive black hole at the heart of a distant galaxy.
The jet, which comes from the heart of a distant blazar called 3C 279, travels at nearly the speed of light and shows complex, twisted patterns near its source. These patterns challenge the standard theory that has been used for 40 years to explain how these jets form and change over time.
A major contribution to the observations was made possible by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, where the data from all participating telescopes were combined to create a virtual telescope with an effective diameter of about 100,000 kilometers.
Their findings were recently published in Nature Astronomy.
Figure 1: Entangled filaments in the blazar 3C 279. High resolution image of the relativistic jet in this source as observed by the RadioAstron program. The image reveals a complex structure within the jet with several parsec-scale filaments forming a helix shape. The array includes data from radio telescopes around the world and on Earth orbit, among them the 100-m Radio Telescope Effelsberg. Data were postprocessed at the correlator centre of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration; VLBA/Jorstad et al.; RadioAstron/Fuentes et al
Insights into Blazars
Blazars are the brightest and most powerful sources of electromagnetic radiation in the cosmos. They are a subclass of active galactic nuclei comprising galaxies with a central supermassive black hole accreting matter from a surrounding disk. About 10% of active galactic nuclei, classified as quasars, produce relativistic plasma jets. Bazars belong to a small fraction of quasars in which we can see these jets pointing almost directly at the observer.
Recently, a team of researchers including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany, has imaged the innermost region of the jet in the blazar 3C 279 at an unprecedented angular resolution and detected remarkably regular helical filaments which may require a revision of the theoretical models used until now for explaining the processes by which jets are produced in active galaxies.
“Thanks to RadioAstron, the space mission for which the orbiting radio telescope reached distances as far away as the Moon, and a network of twenty-three radio telescopes distributed across the Earth, we have obtained the highest-resolution image of the interior of a blazar to date, allowing us to observe the internal structure of the jet in such detail for the first time,” says Antonio Fuentes, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) in Granada, Spain, leading the work.
Theoretical Implications and Challenges
The new window on the universe opened by the RadioAstron mission has revealed new details in the plasma jet of 3C 279, a blazar with a supermassive black hole at its core. The jet has at least two twisted filaments of plasma extending more than 570 light-years from the center.
“This is the first time we have seen such filaments so close to the jet’s origin, and they tell us more about how the black hole shapes the plasma. The inner jet was also observed by two other telescopes, the GMVA and the EHT, at much shorter wavelengths (3.5 mm and 1.3 mm), but they were unable to detect the filamentary shapes because they were too faint and too large for this resolution,” says Eduardo Ros, a member of the research team and European scheduler of the GMVA. “This shows how different telescopes can reveal different features of the same object,” he adds.
Figure 2: RadioAstron VLBI observation provide a virtual telescope of up to eight times the Earth’s diameter (350,000 km maximum baseline). Credit: Roscosmos
The jets of plasma coming from blazars are not really straight and uniform. They show twists and turns that show how the plasma is affected by the forces around the black hole. The astronomers studying these twists in 3C279, called helical filaments, found that they were caused by instabilities developing in the jet plasma. In the process, they also realized that the old theory they had used to explain how the jets changed over time no longer worked. Hence, new theoretical models are needed that can explain how such helical filaments form and evolve so close to the jet origin. This is a great challenge, but also a great opportunity to learn more about these amazing cosmic phenomena.
“One particularly intriguing aspect arising from our results is that they suggest the presence of a helical magnetic field that confines the jet,” says Guang-Yao Zhao, presently affiliated to the MPIfR and member of the scientists team. “Therefore, it could be the magnetic field, which rotates clockwise around the jet in 3C 279, that directs and guides the jet’s plasma moving at a speed of 0.997 times the speed of light.”
“Similar helical filaments were observed in extragalactic jets before, but on much larger scales where they are believed to result from different parts of the flow moving at different speeds and shearing against each other,” adds Andrei Lobanov, another MPIfR scientist in the researchers team. “With this study, we are entering an entirely novel terrain in which these filaments can be actually connected to the most intricate processes in the immediate vicinity of the black hole producing the jet.”
The study of the inner jet in 3C279, now featured in the latest issue of Nature Astronomy, extends the ongoing strive to understand better the role of magnetic fields in the initial formation of relativistic outflows from active galactic nuclei. It stresses the numerous remaining challenges for the current theoretical modeling of these processes and demonstrates the need for further improvement of radio astronomical instruments and techniques which offer the unique opportunity for imaging distant cosmic objects at a record angular resolution.
Technological Advancements and Collaboration
Using a special technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), a virtual telescope with an effective diameter equal to the maximum separation between the antennas involved in an observation is created by combining and correlating data from different radio observatories. RadioAstron project scientist Yuri Kovalev, now at the MPIfR, emphasizes the importance of healthy international collaboration to achieve such results: “Observatories from twelve countries have been synchronized with the space antenna using hydrogen clocks, forming a virtual telescope the size of the distance to the Moon.”
Anton Zensus, director of the MPIfR and one of the driving forces behind the RadioAstron mission over the last two decades, states: “The experiments with RADIOASTRON that led to images like these for the quasar 3C279 are exceptional achievements possible through international scientific collaboration of observatories and scientists in many countries. The mission took decades of joint planning before the satellite’s launch. Making the actual images became possible by connecting large telescopes on the ground like Effelsberg and by a careful analysis of the data in our VLBI correlation center in Bonn.”
Reference: “Filamentary structures as the origin of blazar jet radio variability” by Antonio Fuentes, José L. Gómez, José M. Martí, Manel Perucho, Guang-Yao Zhao, Rocco Lico, Andrei P. Lobanov, Gabriele Bruni, Yuri Y. Kovalev, Andrew Chael, Kazunori Akiyama, Katherine L. Bouman, He Sun, Ilje Cho, Efthalia Traianou, Teresa Toscano, Rohan Dahale, Marianna Foschi, Leonid I. Gurvits, Svetlana Jorstad, Jae-Young Kim, Alan P. Marscher, Yosuke Mizuno, Eduardo Ros and Tuomas Savolainen, 26 October 2023, Nature Astronomy.
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-023-02105-7
Further Information
The Earth-to-Space Interferometer RadioAstron mission, active from July 2011 to May 2019, consisted of a 10-meter orbiting radio telescope (Spektr-R) and a collection of about two dozen of the world’s largest ground-based radio telescopes, including the 100-m Effelsberg radio telescope. When the signals of individual telescopes were combined using the interference of radio waves, this array of telescopes provided a maximum angular resolution equivalent to a radio telescope of 350.000 km in diameter – almost the distance between the Earth and Moon. This made RadioAstron the highest angular resolution instrument in the history of astronomy. The RadioAstron project was led by the Astro Space Center of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Lavochkin Scientific and Production Association under a contract with the State Space Corporation ROSCOSMOS, in collaboration with partner organizations in Russia and other countries. The astronomical data of this mission are being analyzed by individual scientists around the world, yielding results as the ones presented here.
Following collaborators of the presented work are affiliated to the MPIfR, in order of appearance at the author list: Guang-Yao Zhao, Andrei P. Lobanov, Yuri Y. Kovalev, Efthalia (Thalia) Traianou, Jae-Young Kim, Eduardo Ros, and Tuomas Savolainen. The collaborators Rocco Lico and Gabriele Bruni have also been affiliated to the MPIfR during the time of the RadioAstron mission.
Yuri Y. Kovalev acknowledges the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel research prize of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation.
What if the singularity in a black hole is actually a plurality. The black hole is a cleaning station in our universe, but also an connective ‘Jet Engine’
To an opposite. Is this other a white hole?
Just imagine it. If it is a cleaner and an injector. Pulling in material & gravity but also ejecting dark energy (matter) What do u surmise?
Good,3C279 Quasar has a multiple jet of two helical ropes of plasma threaded into a single structure;is due to combination of rotation of SMBH and rest of stars in the galaxy as found distintly to be occured in
a joint.
To escape a black hole, only antimatter could do something to cause eruption.
Could be also something else, I’m not so knowledgeable.
Hello and courtesy, the story of black holes is very strange and dreamlike.I like Dr. Kako very much.He has a very lovely and friendly face.He talked a lot about the force of gravity in black holes and wormholes, and maybe it will be interesting for you.I also thought and thought about this issue a lot, but I don’t want to take the passion and taste of those who are interested in this issue from them.It is because the closest wormhole to us is 1600 light years away, the journey to the nearest star which is Alpha Centauri is 4.2 light years, the distance of this star from the earth is 40 trillion kilometers, that is 25 trillion miles, if astar wants to travel at a speed of 60 thousand miles to It takes nearly 50,000 years to reach this star.If we travel to a wormhole at a speed of 600,000 miles, it will take about 2 million years for that star to reach the wormhole, and this distance is ten thousand trillion.I wish this issue and the issue of traveling to the wormhole may be possible or impossible, but for some people, this theory may be interesting to have fun.There will be no life like Earth beside any star in the galaxy.We are connected with God.This verse is related to God.In the name of God, life and wisdom, let no superior thought pass away.This is the word of our God.There is also a verse in the Qur’an that I have for you.I meant it, but its meaning changes, that’s why every prophet’s book is written for his own people, not for other people whose language is not the same, when it is translated, the meaning changes in Surah Irahim, because there was an ethnic conflictamong the followers of the religions.In the old days, God Abraham said, “We did not send a messenger to any people except those who speak the same language, and God sends a messenger from his own people, but the Islamic extremists say that Muhammad is the Messenger of God forall peoples, according to the instructions of the Quran, but the Quran says that every messenger should speak the same language as his own people. Therefore, Muhammad is not the prophet of all nations because he does not speak the same language as all the peoplesof the world, according to verse four of Surah Ibrahim, he also sends a prophet to execute the divine decrees and justice of God, and other peoples and the followers of that prophet should never read the book of their own messenger. This is the versethat God said to His Messengers in Surah Ibrahim before Muhammad. They manipulated the Qur’an, when the Iraqi caliphs were collecting the Qur’an, they mixed their words related to the war with the verses of the Qur’an, but we acceptsome verses of the Qur’an that we understand with our own intellect to be good and correct, and I am sending them to you.This is the verse, God’s kingdom and sovereignty is in this divine possession, the possession means the earth, God inspired me through Surah Al-Mahalal that they have shaped the seas and continents in the form of humans and mammals and the American continent in theform of a flying bird.The Gods of the earth two periods before us, they had civilization on the earth, they shaped the earth, the doctor of religion and astronomy, and the mystical poet Mehrdad from Iran, Iran, the earth has been a full point in the middle east, all the names of Yazdan are on it, the sign of this sonnet, the first verse of the verse, is evolution
This is the verse, God’s kingdom and sovereignty is in this divine possession, the possession means the earth, God inspired me through Surah Al-Mahalal that they have shaped the seas and continents in the form of humans and mammals and the American continent in theform of a flying bird.The Gods of the earth two eras before us, they had civilization on the earth, they shaped the earth, the doctor of religion and astronomy, and mystic poet Mehrdad from Iran, Iran, the earth has been a full point in the middle east,all the names of Yazdan are on it, the sign of this sonnet, the first verse of the verse, is evolution, every If any of you have any questions, send me a short message, may God protect you in all stages of life.Do not send messages to Dr. Mehrdad’s mobile number.It does not work.They blocked the regime of the dictator of Iran because God does not accept this regime of Islamic mullahs.00989332197646 I will be happy for your comments.Let me send my greetings to Dr. Michio Kaku.His grandfather and his father lived in America, and his grandfather is traveling to America from Japan to rebuild the damages caused by the earthquake.May God protect you in all stages of your life.Hafez An article about Jupiter, Mars and Earth.The reason why Jupiter and Saturn rotate very fast is due to hundreds of stars hitting the surface of Saturn and Jupiter.When two gears turn against each other, the star always turns against the planet because it is opposite to the planet.A slow impact transfers the rotational force to the planet and causes the planet’s speed to increase around itself.That’s why Saturn and Jupiter orbit much faster than Mars and Earth, while Mars and Earth are closer to the Sun and must They go around themselves faster than Saturn and Jupiter, but why do they go slower?This is because no stars hit Mars and Earth, but Saturn and Jupiter were hit by the stars of the arm of the galaxy, but those stars that hit Saturn and Jupiter are hundreds of times smaller than They were the sun.If they were bigger than the sun, Mars and the earth would be very hot and the earth would not have life.Because the earth is closer to the sun than Mars, it rotates faster, but because Mars is farther from the sun, it rotates slower than the earth.Why?Mars and Earth rotate much slower than Saturn.SMS me your answers about this.My email does not work in the Islamic Republic.I am waiting for your answers.Send me a message.Are there hundreds of moons next to and around the planets Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter?Was it because the stars and planets came next to them?Did those stars and planets come from the arm of the galaxy?In the solar system, next to Saturn and Jupiter, these two big planets have 185 moons.Were these moons the same as the planets of the big two-armed stars of the galaxy?
Black holes are very strange and dreamlike.I love Dr. Kako very much.He has a very lovely and friendly face.He talked a lot about the force of gravity in black holes and wormholes, and it might be interesting for you.I also thought about this.I thought about the problem a lot, but I don’t want to take away the passion and enthusiasm of those who are interested in this subject.He said that with the centrifugal force, a wormhole can travel to the stars.This is more of a dream because the closest wormhole is It is 1,600 light years away from us.The journey to the nearest star, which is Alpha Centauri, is 4.2 light years.The distance between this star and the earth is 40 trillion kilometers, which means 25 trillion miles.It will take fifty thousand years if we travel to a wormhole at a speed of 600 thousand miles, it will take about 2 million years to reach that wormhole, this distance is ten thousand trillion miles, this matter of traveling to the wormhole may be possibleor impossible.But for some, this theory might be interesting to entertain.If man can get close to a black hole, where will he go next?His next destination has not been determined, which star he wants to go to.Besides, there will be no life like Earth in the galaxy.I am with God.I am connected.This verse is related to God.The kingdom and government of God was on this planet and it was impossible to travel anywhere else.We all turned around.We did not see life except the universe.The kingdom and reign of God is in this divine possession.The verse of the Qur’an is in the name of God, life and wisdom, let him be the superior thought.This is the word of our Lord, there is a verse from the Qur’an that I have interpreted for you, but its meaning changes, that’s why every prophet’s book is written for his own people, not for another people whose language is not thesame, when it is translated, its meaning changes.In Surah Irahim, because there was ethnic conflict among the followers of the old religions, God said to Abraham, “We have not sent a messenger to any nation except those who speak the same language, and God sends a messenger from the same nation,but the extreme Islamics say that Muhammad is the Messenger of God for all nations, the instructions of the Qur’an.”He, but the Qur’an says that every messenger must act on the same language as his own people, so Muhammad is not the prophet of all nations because he does not have the same language as all the peoples of the world, according to versefour of Surah Ibrahim, he also sends a prophet to implement the divine decrees and justice of God, and never Other peoples and the followers of that prophet should not impose the book of their messenger on people who did not speak the same language as that prophet.This is the verse that God said to his messengers in Surah Ibrahim before Muhammad.they don’t accept it, they have the right because we know that those who led the caliphate manipulated the Qur’an, the Iraqi caliphs mixed their words related to war with the verses of the Qur’an when compiling the Qur’an,but we understand some of the verses of the Qur’an that we understand with our own intellect.It is good and true, we cook it and I am sending it to you, which is this verse, God inspired me through Surah al-Tawal, that he shaped the seas and continents in the shape of humans and mammals, and the American continentin the shape of a flying bird.There are human beings of the earth two periods before us, they had a civilization on the earth, they shaped the earth, a doctor of religions and astronomy, and a mystical poet Mehrdad from Iran, Iran, the earth has been a full point inthe middle east, all the names of Yazdan are on it, the sign of this sonnet, the first verse of the verse, is evolution
The helicity was predicted in a 2014 HJ paper, arising from precession of the two plasma flows forming the torus where they meet on the axis. The opposing jet will have opposite Chirality. It’s found ALL accreted main disc matter re-emerges in these ‘Quasar Jet’ outflows. The new implied CYCLIC evolutionary sequence for galaxies was well received at the recent AAS Pasadena conference.
The sun is in one of the two large arms of the galaxy, now the sun is crossing and hitting the arm of the galaxy, this happens again and in fact the life of the earth is renewed, that is, life does not disappear completely becauseevery time It happens in a hundred million years, because the galaxy has two large arms, that’s why we say that this event is repeated for a hundred million years.This happens and a hundred million years is a very long time.And during this long time, life on earth is alive.And they realized that there were people living on earth before them who also shaped the continents and seas into creatures for people.Some time ago they lived on earth and they gave us this message so that we know this is important.I mean that life appeared on earth several times and was destroyed again, and continents and seas were created by civilized humans before us and before.It was created from them.which destroyed the earth in a few hundred million years and the last civilization in a hundred million years ago.Several advanced civilizations on Earth were wiped out due to the collision of countless stars of the galaxy with the solar system a few hundred million years ago.In the map of the Americas, the bird that was flying over the Americas was unable to take off due to the impact of the meteor on its left wing from the said planet and the star that hit the sun and then disintegrated, and they could notget off the ground.go to space That bird photo tells about this tragic incident that informed us to be alert and think of a solution to prevent this incident and it is strange and amazing that it is true in America that more flights are being made now.The bird and the head of the tribe in North and South America imagined that he is going to Brazil.That means the old man can’t go, because the meteorites pulled him down, but in the other three big continents of the world, Asia, Europe and Africa, now the conflict There is war and war and killing and looting.An Arab or a black man wounds.The breast of a camel with the fork of a man whose machete is the Red Sea and who takes the head of an animal for its horn.The same is true of the Horn of Africa.An image of a horn sitting on the face and forehead of a rhinoceros on the east side of the map.There is the whole continent of Africa and it is strange and amazing that elephants and rhinos have been killed and their heads cut off in the continent of Africa.An elephant with a trunk in front of an Arab man, their expensive horns and the map of Khartoun country, is the trunk of an elephant who holds the Arab man’s hand with his trunk so that he does not grab the head of the rhinoceros with hismachete and does not tear the camel’s chest and the tip of the man’s machete does not touch the camel’s chest.And the name of that region is Giza.In Persian, Giza means wound.Go to the world map and look at the Red Sea, the machete is an attacking man, the tip of the machete is right near Giza, these are.the wonders of the supernatural world.I have already explained in my comments for this site.Please send me a detailed message because the Islamic Republic of Iran may have blocked my email or the problem is elsewhere.Mehrdad from America, send me an SMS, I am waiting for your message, I have the position of the sun, right now in the middle of the big arm of the galaxy, I calculated the distance from the sun to the nearest star is fortytrillion kilometers.The life of the earth may be renewed in another two thousand years.Arms are moving fast.Anyone in America know how to send me the speed of the two giant arms of the galaxy, I will say exactly how many thousands of years the arm of the galaxy will hit the sun.Thank you for posting this or other comments on the NASA site
Hello, thank you to the administrator of the scitech daily website, why doesn’t anyone contact me?My email is not working because of political issues.All good and popular scientific sites have been closed by the Iranian regime.I wanted to communicate and exchange opinions with astronomers.The situation in Iran is good.We don’t have it from an economic point of view.From now on, I will try to put a good translation in the texts for my comments.When translating with Google, sometimes the words are moved back and forth, so I try to correct them again.Finally, I thank you for taking the trouble.And I entrust you to the great God, may God protect you, Dr. Mehrdad, an Iranian astrologer, in the olden days, the land of Iran was called the land of Iran, because Iran is connected to all the generations of the earth,that is, it is connected to all the races of the world in terms of culture and language.
I highly suggest the author, or whoever the responsible party is, should put forth the little extra effort required to write titles that are more concise, and clear to avoid ambiguity. Someone might come upon the title of the above article, and decide to browse past it because they inferred from the title that it was not a legitimate story. I nearly did the same myself, but my curiosity won out again. I could not help but wonder how it was possible to build a telescope that was eight times the size of Earth. Where would you acquire the materials to build such a enormous structure that defies logic? My initial thought was that it couldn’t possibly be real, then I thought perhaps they are referencing a two-dimensional size, which still didn’t seem feasible. Then, I had a few other random thoughts come to me in quick succession, until my curiosity greeted me, and persuaded me to click the link to the this article, where I would discover the telescope, akin to the molecular structure of solid objects, was comprised of several advanced radio telescope networks, so like I had just alluded to, the majority of the telescope’s colossal size was empty space, which explains how something of such a large magnitude could be built to be eight times the size of Earth. Just a thought I had which might prove to be beneficial at some point for the responsible party to keep in mind.