Dr. Eileen Meyer, along with her PhD student Peter Breiding and Dr. Markos Georganopoulos and other colleagues has a new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.  Using images from the new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, the team has verified the synchrotron spectrum from a 300,000 light-year long plasma jet for the first time at sub-millimeter wavelengths.  These observations lead to a direct test of the popular "inverse-Compton of the CMB (IC/CMB)” model for X-ray emission in these jets, in conjunction with NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope.  P. Breiding lead the effort to push the limits of observation with Fermi to show that the gamma-ray emission predicted by the ALMA observations is not detected, invalidating the IC/CMB model at the 8.7 sigma level. These findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 835, Issue 2, article id. L35, 6 pp. (2017).

Four-panel figure showing the same jet at different wavelengths.  In all cases, the green contours represent the radio image at 17 GHz. At top right, the X-ray emission from the jet, as seen by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and in the other panels the new ALMA observations in bands 3 (100 GHz), 6 (233 GHz) and 7 (345 GHz).  From Meyer et al.,(2017).