Supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun lurk in the centers of most galaxies. In addition to feeding on nearby gas and dust, some of these black holes launch massive jets of plasma that not only dwarf the black hole itself, but the entire galaxy in which they reside. The mechanics of these jets, including exactly where they are launched, are still poorly understood, but observations such as those recently achieved using a combination of Earth- and space-based radio telescopes will help unlock the mysteries surrounding these dramatic structures.In a paper published April 2 in Nature Astronomy , an international collaboration of astronomers released observations of the jets around the black hole in the galaxy NGC 1275, located in the Perseus Cluster of galaxies about 230 million light-years away. Also known as Perseus A or 3C 84, this galaxy is classified as a Seyfert galaxy, meaning it has an “active” black hole currently feeding on surrounding material. That black hole is in the early stages of generating massive jets, which have now been mapped out via radio observations down to a mere 12 light-days from their origin around the black hole. That’s just a few hundred times the radius of the black hole itself (1 light-day is about 16 billion miles [26 billion kilometers]).What they found surprised them. “It turned out that the observed width of the jet was significantly wider than what was expected in the currently favored models where the jet is launched from the black hole’s ergosphere — an area of space right next to a spinning black hole where space itself is dragged to a circling motion around the hole,” said the paper’s lead author, Gabriele Giovannini from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, in a press release