VLBA, RXTE team up to pinpoint black hole's outburst
Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - 14:31
in Astronomy & Space
Astronomers have gained an important clue about a ubiquitous cosmic process by pinpointing the exact moment when gigantic "bullets" of fast-moving material were launched from the region surrounding a black hole. They made this breakthrough by using the ultra-sharp radio "vision" of the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), along with NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite, to study an outburst from a system including a black hole and its companion star in 2009.