This page presents some preliminary results from an effort to make a properly-sampled movie of the M87 jet at 43 GHz with the VLBA. The investigators are Craig Walker, Chun Ly, Bill Junor, and Phil Hardee. A pilot project (BW082) was used to determine an appropriate frame rate. The actual movie project (BW088) is meant to have 18 observations spaced at 3 week intervals. The first observation was on Jan. 27, 2007. The last should be close to Jan. 19, 2008. The movie below is based on the observations up to Aug 25, 2007.

The image below was made by convolving 23 images of the M87 movie project to a common resolution and stacking them, weighted by the noise levels. The resolution is 0.43 by 0.21 milli arcsecond (mas) elongated in position angle -16 deg. Because of the averaging, the source appears smoother than the individual epochs, much like running water appears smooth in a long exposure photograph. Note that, for a 3 billion solar mass black hole and a distance of 16 Mpc, 100 times the Schwarzschild radius is 0.37 mas. Also 1 mas = 0.078 pc and 1 c is 4 mas/yr.
 
 

The movie is a full resolution sequence (beam 0.43 by 0.21 mas at -16 deg PA) of the actual observations from the first 11 epochs of project BW088. The ticks at the bottom of the frames are spaced according to the times of the observations. The moving square shows the date of the frame. The movie pauses on the first and last frames. Interpolation was not used for the movie because it mainly confuses the situation when motions of more than a beam between frames are involved.
 
 

A significantly slower version of the movie can be seen by clicking here.
 

Below is a black-and-white version of the movie showing only the inner few milliarcseconds.
 
 

Powerpoint slides from my presentation at the meeting entitled "Approaching Micro-Arcsecond Resolution with VSOP-2: Astrophysics and Technology" on Dec. 3-7, 2007 can be found in the talks section of my web page: (html version)   (pdf version - 8.4GB).

More information for the collaborators on this project is available in a password-protected area.