A team of astronomers in Japan, for the first time, discovered a faint radio emission covering a giant galaxy as a result of achieving high imaging dynamic range. Radio emission is emitted by the gas created directly by the central black hole.
Using the same technique to additional quasars, the team hopes to learn more about how a black hole interacts with its host galaxy.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile (ALMA), astronomers targeted the quasar 3C 273, which lies at 2.4 billion light-years from Earth. It is the first quasar ever discovered, the brightest, and the best studied. However, much less has been known about its host galaxy itself because combining the faint and diffuse galaxy with the 3C273 nucleus required such high dynamic ranges to detect.
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