A group of researchers have used two types of telescopes to produce stunning images of clusters of galaxies. This gives more information about the amount of energy released around the black holes. The method of the astronomer will soon be published in a journal.
Huge jets are produced by black holes at the center of the universe. The jets shoot away from the black hole. Billions of light-years in diameter are formed when the jets collide with gas. It can take hundreds of millions of years for the lobes to go away. The lobes give an astronomer a lot of information about what happened in a cluster.
Information is hard to get from the lobes. The international team of astronomer has ended that. LOFAR is located in the Netherlands and the X-ray satellite Chandra is in India.
It's more than the sum.
A better idea of what is going on is provided by the combination of those two things.
The whole is more important than the parts here. Chandra and LOFAR can estimate the amount of energy injected by the black hole into the environment, but together they are even stronger. Chandra's X-ray images were not able to be matched with radio images. The resolution is high because LOFAR antenna stations are in Europe.
Radio images are comparable to visible-light images from the Hubble Telescope. They imaged the cluster. There are more than a thousand galaxies in the direction of the northern constellation.
Astronomers are taking pictures of other clusters. They hope to understand more about the interactions between galaxies and their surroundings.
More information: R. Timmerman et al, Measuring cavity powers of active galactic nuclei in clusters using a hybrid X-ray-radio method. A new window on feedback opened by subarcsecond LOFAR-VLBI observations, Astronomy & Astrophysics (2022). DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202243936The preprint is at arxiv.org/abs.
Journal information: Astronomy & Astrophysics
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