Explanation:
What if you could see the huge radio jets of Centaurus A rising?
The Cen A
radio jets are not only
over a
million light years long, they occupy an angular area over
200 times greater than the full Moon in Earth's sky.
The jets are expelled by a violent
black hole
millions of times the mass of our Sun embedded deep in the center of nearby
active galaxyCen A.
Somehow, the
black hole
creates the fast moving jets as other matter falls in.
In this picture,
radio telescopes from the
Australian Telescope
Compact Array (ATCA)
near Narrabri,
NSW,
Australia,
were captured in front of a full Moon, with a radio image of
Cen A superposed at its
real angular size
in the background.
The above picture includes
the most detailed map yet of any galaxy-class radio jets in the
universe, taking
several years
and over 1,000 hours exposure time to complete.
Details in the photo may yield clues as to how
radio jets
interact with stars and intergalactic dust.
The light dots in the image depict not stars, but typically other
radio bright galaxies
in the even more distant universe.
