A new imaging technique that takes standard two-dimensional (2D) radio images and reconstructs them as three-dimensional (3D) ones could tell us more about structures such as the jet-like features streaming out of galactic black holes. According to the technique’s developers, it could even call into question physical models of how radio galaxies formed in the first place.
“We will now be able to obtain information about the 3D structures in polarized radio sources whereas currently we only see their 2D structures as they appear in the plane of the sky,” explains Lawrence Rudnick, an observational astrophysicist at the University of Minnesota, US, who led the study. “The analysis technique we have developed can be performed not only on the many new maps to be made with powerful telescopes such as the Square Kilometre Array and its precursors, but also from decades of polarized maps in the literature.”
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