Astronomers just dropped a video 27 years in the making: the highest-definition animation of a gargantuan black hole jet blasting out of a distant galaxy and twisting off into space.
The video, made from 116 images taken between 1995 and 2022, captured a blazar known as 3C 345, in the constellation Hercules. A blazar is a sort of quasar — a bright, feeding supermassive black hole embedded in the center of a faraway galaxy — that emits huge jets of gas into its environment. The jets blaze at nearly the speed of light and are charged with highly concentrated X-rays and gamma rays.
As described in an Aug. 26 study in the journal Nature, scientists gathered the images of 3C 345 using decades of observations by the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a network of 10 telescopes spread across the U.S. (VLBA had two programs that caught views of the jet, called BEAM-ME and MOJAVE, which collectively followed hundreds of blazar sources.)
To turn those hundr...
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