Astronomers have captured a breathtaking radio wave image, showing our closest radio active black hole emitting massive jets of plasma that span more than 16 times the size of the full moon in our sky.
The black hole in question is located in the center of the galaxy.
The black hole has a mass of 55 million Suns but is not visible in the image. It is located in the center of the two butterfly wing-like lobes.
The length of 16 full moons laid next to each other and the length of the plasma eruption from the black hole are all visible from Earth.
The dots in the background of the image are not stars. They're radio galaxies like Centaurus A that are far away.
The radio jets are over a million light-years long, so the galaxy isn't fully visible in this image.
The jets are in radio waves. Ben McKinley, ICRAR/Curtin, and Louisiana State University.
The 'radio bubbles' of plasma aren't visible to the human eye. It would be pretty amazing if they were.
They are visible in this picture because of the radio wave emissions captured by the MWA telescope. It's the first time we've seen it in such detail.
The NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. are included.
Above is a closer look at Centaurus A, as seen in visible light, as well as X-ray and orange.
It's cool when you realize the black hole in the giant bubbles is sucking up the nearby matter as it moves at close to the speed of light.
"Radio waves come from material being sucked into a black hole in the middle of the galaxy," says astronomer Benjamin McKinley.
Our new image overcomes the limitations of previous radio observations, which could not handle the extreme brightness of the jets and details of the larger area surrounding the galaxy.
The research that comes with the image has added support to an emerging model known as 'Chaotic Cold Accretion'.
The model says that clouds of cold gas condense in the halo and rain down on the central regions, feeding the black hole.
The black hole reacts by launching energy back via radio jets that inflate the spectacular lobes we see in the MWA image. This study is one of the first to investigate the multiphase CCA weather over the full range of scales.
There are 256 tiles in the MWA. Pete Wheeler is from ICRAR.
The 4,096 spider-like antennae that make up the MWA are organized into 256 grids called 'tiles'.
Nature Astronomy has published the research.
