Using two types of telescopes, researchers have gained impressive images of clusters of galaxies, and scientists have gained more information about the huge amount of energy that flows around supermassive black holes in objects of this type.
Astronomers have long known that supermassive black holes in the center of the galaxy produce huge jeets. These jets come out of a black hole and heat gas in space. When the jeets run into areas of gas, they form huge petals with a diameter of tens of thousands of light years. It takes hundreds of millions of years to disappear. Theoretically, these areas of space give astronomers information about what happened in the cluster.
The problem is that information is difficult to extract. An international team of astronomers solved the problem by combining the measurements of the LOFAR radio telescope with the X-ray satellite Chandra. Hubble data were used by scientists as a background for a new image.
This combination gives a better idea of what's going on, explained by scientists. Previously, it was impossible because there were no available radio images of sufficient quality to match the X-ray images of the Chandra. Since the LOFAR antenna stations are now located throughout Europe, the resolution has become quite high.
To demonstrate their technology, they photographed a cluster of Perseus, a group of over a thousand galaxies, located about 240 million light-years in the direction of the northern constellation of Perseus.
Now astronomers continue to create composite images of other clusters. Using basic data, they hope to better understand the interaction between galaxies and their surroundings in the early universe.