An international group of scientists including astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) and ALMA present new observations of the first quasar ever identified. Its name is 3C273 and it is located at a distance of approx. 1.9 Billion light years in the Virgo constellation. The new high-resolution radio images trace the jet down to the jet formation region and show how the width of the jet varies with distance from the central black hole.
The results are published in the current issue of the Astrophysical Journal with the titel Collimation of the Relativistic Jet in the Quasar 3C 273.
Image: © Hiroki Okino and Kazunori Akiyama; GMVA+ALMA and HSA images: Okino et al.; HST Image: ESA/Hubble & NASA. The views of the 3C 273 jet from the deepest to farthest ends. The left image shows the deepest look yet into the plasma jet of the quasar 3C 273, which will allow scientists to further study how quasar jets are collimated, or narrowed. The powerful, collimated jet extends for hundreds of thousands of light-years beyond the host galaxy, as seen in the right panel optical image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists use radio images at different scales to measure the shape of the entire jet. The radio interferometer arrays used are the Global Millimeter VLBI Array (GMVA) joined by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the High Sensitivity Array (HSA).