His discovery of quasars - quasi-stellar radio sources, was a fundamental breakthrough and rooted the idea that supermassive black holes could actually exist in modern astrophysics. This started an entire field and eventually led to the first image of a black hole in 2019. #RIP

https://twitter.com/jwst_news2022/status/1572021668255600642

After World War II radio astronomy rapidly developed and found bright „radio galaxies“, but many radio sources sources were unidentified. The Parkes radio telescope used a clever technique, where the moon would occult the radio source #273 in the 3rd Cambride catalog: 3C273.

Today I had the honor to reveal a beautiful statue of Hans Lipperhey in the Abbey of Middelburg during a little ceremony. „Who?“ you may ask. Well, this craftsman actually invented the „Dutch perspective glass“ that Galileo used to revolutionize astronomy & we now call telescope. We all remember Galileo, the academic, but tend to forget the craftsman that made all this possible. Every breakthrough in astronomy is based on better telescopes and better observations. That’s why instrumentmakers are so important in our field!

These giant “scissors in space” point to the location of a supermassive black hole of 55 Million solar masses in the heart of the giant radio galaxy Centaurus A! Brand new image with unprecedented resolution by the @ehtelescope and our group @Radboud_Uni
ru.nl/english/news-a… In Centaurus A we do not see a ring like in M87, because the black hole is smaller. We see the plasma jet shooting out from the center and that looks remarkably like the jet in M87. This points to universal similarities of black hole jets!