WASH Talks: Anniek Glouedmans (NOIRLab Gemini-N) & Tod Lauer (NOIRLab)

Miércoles, 05 Marzo 2025 1 p.m. — 2 p.m. MST

NOIRLab Headquarters | 950 North Cherry Ave., Tucson, AZ 85719

FLASH Talks

Anniek Gloudemans (NOIRLab Gemini-N)
Discovery of a Monster Radio Jet at z~5
Thanks to recent deep all-sky optical and radio surveys, radio galaxies and radio-loud quasars have now been discovered up to z~7. However, despite these discoveries, there appears to be a lack of large (~100 kpc) radio lobes at z>4, while plenty of giant radio galaxies are found in the more local Universe (i.e. those with projected lengths >700 kpc). In this talk, I will present our discovery of the largest radio jet at z>4 in the z = 4.912 radio-loud quasar J1601+3102, which was discovered using sub-arcsecond resolution imaging with the International LOFAR Telescope. These images reveal a highly asymmetrical jet structure, eluding to extreme environmental conditions. Despite the extreme radio jets, its (near-)infrared spectrum from Gemini-North does not reveal an extraordinary mass or accretion rate. Is J1601+3102 a chance discovery, or could it be part of a population of radio sources with large-scale jets that remained unseen until now? The discovery of this monster radio jet was recently featured by NOIRLab here.

Tod Lauer (NOIRLab)
A Demonstration of Interstellar Navigation using New Horizons

As NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft ventures beyond the Kuiper Belt, it has traveled far enough that the nearest stars have shifted by a large fraction of an arc-minute from their positions as seen from Earth. We demonstrated this directly by imaging the fields containing Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359 simultaneously from Earth and New Horizons when the spacecraft was 47 au distant. The observed parallaxes for Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359 are 32 and 16 arcseconds, respectively. The precise position of the two stars as seen by New Horizons further provides the three-dimensional spatial location of the spacecraft relative to the Solar System barycenter. As this is done with spacecraft-based images alone referenced to pre-existing Gaia astrometry, it is a demonstration of autonomous interstellar navigation.  For celestial navigation on Earth we treat the stars as fixed.  Interstellar navigation works by seeing how nearby stars shift with respect to more distant ones as the spacecraft leaves the Solar System bound for the galaxy beyond.