Clusters of galaxies easier to view with radio X-ray combination

Via the intelligent use of two sorts of telescopes, a staff of researchers has produced gorgeous pictures of clusters of galaxies. This not solely produces lovely pictures, but additionally supplies extra details about the large quantities of vitality launched round supermassive black holes in clusters. The astronomers, led by Ph.D. scholar Roland Timmerman (Leiden College, the Netherlands), will quickly publish their technique within the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Astronomers have lengthy identified that supermassive black holes on the facilities of galaxies produce large jets. These jets shoot away from the black hole and warmth the gasoline within the wider environment. When the jets collide with gasoline, they type large lobes tens of hundreds of light-years in diameter. It may take a whole lot of thousands and thousands of years for these lobes to fade out. Thus, in idea, not less than, the lobes give astronomers quite a lot of info concerning what occurred in a cluster.

The issue, nevertheless, is that the knowledge is tough to extract from the lobes. A world staff of astronomers has now put an finish to that. They mixed measurements from the radio telescope LOFAR, whose core is within the Netherlands, with these from the X-ray satellite Chandra.

Complete better than sum

“That mixture supplies a a lot better thought of what’s going on,” explains researcher Roland Timmerman (Leiden College, the Netherlands).

“It is cliché, however the entire is actually better than the sum of the components right here. Chandra and LOFAR can individually make a fairly affordable guess concerning the quantity of vitality injected by the black hole into the cluster setting, however collectively they’re even stronger. Beforehand, this mix was not attainable as a result of no radio pictures have been out there with ample high quality to match Chandra’s X-ray pictures. As a result of LOFAR antenna stations at the moment are situated all through Europe, the decision is excessive sufficient.”

The astronomers now have radio pictures which can be comparable in sharpness to visible-light pictures from the Hubble telescope. To exhibit their method, they imaged the Perseus cluster. That could be a group of greater than a thousand galaxies situated about 240 million light-years within the route of the northern constellation Perseus.

In the meantime, astronomers are creating composite pictures of different clusters of galaxies. With the underlying knowledge, they hope to grasp extra concerning the interactions between galaxies and their environment within the early universe.