Behold a far topographic point in the universe . The picture above — of radiocommunication emission coming from a squirt of particles , accelerated to nearly the speed of visible light by the gravitational power of a disgraceful muddle more than 900 million light - years away — represents the highest - resolution astronomical double ever entrance , its Jehovah say . The astronomers just published their data in theAstrophysical Journal .
Admittedly , it may not look like much to the bare eye , but for what it is , it ’s pretty cool . The BL Lacertae ( BL Lac ) coltsfoot is far away , and these radio set emissions are fallible . The pictorial matter is compile from signaling collected in November 2013 by the Spektr - R satellite of the RadioAstron mission and 15 radio telescopes on Earth , nine of them part of the National Science Foundation ’s Very Long Baseline Array ( VLBA ) .
The proficiency of very farsighted service line interferometry , or VLBI , has been around since the 1970s . VLBI combines the findings of multiple telescopes to create a composite picture , a process that can give images1000 time sharperthan those from the Hubble Telescope , according tothe Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy , where the data from all the telescopes was combined to create the image .
In this case , the answer was an double with the adjudicate power of a telescope nigh 63,000 statute mile broad , or almost eight times the diam of the Earth . It may calculate smudgy , but it ’s the equivalent of a percipient picture of a half - dollar bill coin on the Moon snapped from the Earth , the research worker say in apress assertion .
The image consecrate " unprecedented detail " about BL Lacertae ’s galactic nucleus , which is powered by a supermassive pitch-dark hole 200 million time more massive than our Sun .
“ In BL Lac , we essentially attend into the hot cosmic hearth which is energizing issue so powerfully that it would require achieving temperature much high than one trillion degree , should we have tried to replicate these conditions on Earth , ” Andrei Lobanov from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy , a co - investigator on the project , says .
