A radio wavelength image of the sky that several bright blobs in the center, and more scattered points of light and blobs scattered in the background. The central blobs are multi coloured and represent Jupiter and Saturn. There are three insets showing the very central image of the region which are zoomed in on Jupiter, Jupiter, Saturn and the Pulsar and a timeseries motion image of the same region.

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   CosmicRami (cosmicrami@aus.social)'s status on Thursday, 21-Dec-2023 08:42:23 JST CosmicRami

   OTD in 2020, Jupiter & Saturn came into conjunction (closest since 1643). MeerKAT (radio interferometer in South Africa) also turned its gaze towards the planets to observe their radio emissions.

   They serendipitously discovered a pulsar in the background!

   Here in the first inset, you can see Jupiter (which is a bright radio source in our sky), as well as Saturn (annotated 'S' - note that it is not as bright a radio source as Jupiter) and the pulsar (annoyed 'P' which stands for pulsar with anomalous refraction recurring on odd timescales - PARROT).

   Also (last two insets), can we all appreciate how incredible Jupiter looks in radio with MeerKAT 𝐵-field vectors overplotted? Radiation belts FTW!

   Oh, and those other sources - they aren't stars ... they are all supermassive black holes in distant galaxies in the background! (look at those jets!)

   📸 https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12165

   #Planets #SolarSystem #RadioAstronomy #Astrodon