Multi-telescope view two million times sharper than human eye reveals black hole

Scientists spaced thousands of miles apart discovered a super massive black hole inside a quasar some five billion light-years from Earth

By Space.com Staff,?Space.com / July 18, 2012

This is an artist?s impression of the quasar 3C 279. Astronomers connected the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), in Chile, to the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii, USA, and the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT) in Arizona, USA for the first time, to make the sharpest observations ever, of the centre of a distant galaxy, the bright quasar 3C 279. Image released July 18, 2012.

ESO/M. Kornmesser

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Scientists using three telescopes spaced thousands of miles apart have caught the best look ever of the center of a distant quasar, an ultra-bright galaxy with a giant black hole at its core.

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By linking powerful radio telescopes in Chile, Arizona and Hawaii together, astronomers created a deep-space observing system with 2 million times sharper vision than the human eye, which gave them the most detailed direct view ever of a supermassive black hole inside a galaxy 5 billion light-years from Earth.

The telescopes revealed a fresh look at the quasar 3C 279, a galaxy in the constellation Virgo that scientists classify as a quasar because it shines ultra-bright as massive amounts of material falls into the giant black hole at its core. The black hole is about 1 billion times the mass of the sun, with the linked-up telescopes providing details down to a resolution of 1 light-year or less, researchers said in an announcement today (July 18).

The new view used an astronomy technique called interferometry and marked "a remarkable achievement for a target that is billions of light-years away," researchers with the European Southern Observatory explained in a statement."The observations represent a new milestone towards imaging supermassive black holes and the regions around them."

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile is home to the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope used in the quasar study. The other two instruments included the Submillimeter Array in Hawaii, and the Submillimeter Telescope in Arizona. [What Does Quasar 3C 279 Really Look Like (Video)]

By linking the three telescopes together, astronomers with ESO, the Onsala Space Observatory and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy used an observation method called Very Long Baseline Interferometry.

Here's how the interferometry method works:

In astronomy, larger telescopes can take sharper pictures or measurements of the universe. The interferometry technique allows astronomers to use multiple telescopes perform as if they were a single telescope, one that is as large as the distance between the different instruments. In Very Long Baseline Interferometry, astronomers seek to maximize the distance between telescopes to create the sharpest views possible.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/9x3c0Hmf2Is/Multi-telescope-view-two-million-times-sharper-than-human-eye-reveals-black-hole

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