Pointing the Russian RadioAstron satellite and four ground-based radio telescopes at a quasar known as 3C 273 revealed a hot surprise that is said to advance current knowledge of quasars and the Milky Way.
Quasars are supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies. Located more than two billion light-years from Earth, 3C 273 emits large jets of material at speeds nearly that of light, which in turn produce radio waves.
Previously, the brightness of these emissions was believed to be limited to about 100 million degrees, but the recent study revealed temperatures can exceed 10 trillion degrees. What's remarkable about the recent study is that it achieved the highest resolution of any astronomical observation ever made.
"Only this space-Earth system could reveal this temperature, and now we have to figure out how that environment can reach such temperatures," explained Yuri Kovalev, the RadioAstron project scientist. "This result is a significant challenge to our current understanding of quasar jets."
The recent observations also showed, for the first time, that the radio waves emitted from the powerful jets of quasars were scattered by the weak interstellar material in our own Milky Way Galaxy, creating what researchers call a substructure.
"This is like looking through the hot, turbulent air above a candle flame. We had never been able to see such distortion of an extragalactic object before," said Michael Johnson, one of the study researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "The amazing resolution we get from RadioAstron working with the ground-based telescopes gives us a powerful new tool to explore not only the extreme physics near the distant supermassive black holes, but also the diffuse material in our home Galaxy."
The RadioAstron satellite was used in conjunction with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, The Very Large Array in New Mexico, the Effelsberg Telescope in Germany and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. This produced a virtual radio telescope more than 100,000 miles across.
Signals received by the RadioAstron satellite - an orbiting radio telescope - were transmitted to an antenna in Green Bank and recorded. These signals were then sent over the Internet to Russia, where they were combined with the data received by the ground-based radio telescopes to form the high resolution image of 3C 273.
Their findings were recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
