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Plasma-jet movie is astronomy’s summer blockbuster

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Just 116 images exist of the active galaxy 3C 345 — but an AI-driven algorithm has created a highly detailed video of the plasma jets blasted from its centre.

By

  1. Yosuke Mizuno

    1. Yosuke Mizuno is in the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 201210, China.

Black holes can’t emit light but the region around them can be extremely bright, ejecting beams of glowing plasma at more than 98% of the speed of light1. When studying these ‘relativistic jets’, astronomers must typically work with a small number of observations, so studying the jets’ dynamics is similar to trying to understand the plot of a film from several still images. But now, writing in Nature, Foschi et al.2 report an artificial-intelligence-driven algorithm called kine that changes the game.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02522-4

References

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  2. Foschi, M. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10988-5 (2026).

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  3. Högbom, J. A. Astron. Astrophys. Suppl. 15, 417–426 (1974).

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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