Astronomers Observe Distant Quasar With Unprecedented Sharpness
Posted on July 19, 2012
An international team of astronomers has observed the heart of a distant quasar with unprecedented sharpness, two million times finer than human vision. Astronomers connected APEX, in Chile, to the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii, USA, and the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT) in Arizona, USA. They were able to make the sharpest direct observation ever, of the center of a distant galaxy, the bright quasar 3C 279. An an artist's impression of the quasar is pictured above. You can see larger version of the image here.
Quasar 3C 279 contains a supermassive black hole with a mass about one billion times that of the Sun. It is so far from Earth that its light has taken more than 5 billion years to reach us. The astronomers were able to probe scales of less than a light-year across the quasar.
The telescopes were linked using a technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). VLBI allows multiple telescopes to act like a single telescope as large as the separation - or 'baseline' - between them. The observations were made in radio waves with a wavelength of 1.3 millimeters.