Cosmic lens sees black hole's burps

摘要

Astronomers have caught their best look yet at blobs of hot gas fleeing a super-massive black hole, thanks to a new kind of cosmic magnifying glass. Anthony Readhead of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory at Caltech and colleagues caught two small, hot bursts traveling away from a bright galaxy called J1415+1320 at near the speed of light. Although the galaxy is billions of light-years away and the blobs are tiny compared with the galaxy, a lucky alignment may have created what's called a gravitational lens that magnified the galaxy and its environs.