Cosmic Magnifying Lens Reveals Inner Jets of Black Holes

An international team of astronomers including J. Anton Zensus from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, found evidence for a bizarre lensing system in space, in which a large assemblage of stars is magnifying a much more distant galaxy containing a jet-spewing supermassive black hole. The discovery provides the best view yet of blobs of hot gas that shoot out from supermassive black holes. The astronomers used Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) for their observations. The results were published by Vedantham et al. in the Astrophysical Journal and Caltech issued a press release .