The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration’s April 11, 2017 image of the quasar 3C 279’s central core and the origin of its jet. Note the surprising orientation of the top ‘blob,’ which possibly represents the first direct observation of a quasar’s accretion disk. (© J.Y. KIM (MPIFR), BOSTON UNIVERSITY BLAZAR PROGRAM, AND THE EHT COLLABORATION)

Beyond The Black Hole: Event Horizon Telescope Solves A Quasar Mystery We Didn’t Know Existed

When you look at the Universe in an entirely new way, you sometimes find what you could never have anticipated.

Almost exactly one year ago today, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released the first-ever image of a black hole’s event horizon. Its publication marked the first time that we’d ever directly detected a region of space where so much matter was concentrated into such a tiny volume that nothing, not even light, could escape from it.

During that same observing campaign, which took place simultaneously across eight different astronomical observatories on Earth, a number of other targets were also imaged, including the quasar 3C 279. With the unprecedented resolution of the Event Horizon Telescope, the origin of this incredibly powerful cosmic jet was revealed for the first time. Although it agrees with what was theoretically predicted, the details are spectacular in an entirely new way.

This artist’s impression shows how J043947.08+163415.7, a very distant quasar powered by a supermassive black hole, may look close up. This object is by far the brightest quasar yet discovered in the early Universe, but only in terms of apparent, not intrinsic, brightness. (ESA/HUBBLE, NASA, M. KORNMESSER)

When they were first discovered, quasars were incredibly mysterious objects. Even the name…