ORIGIN OF RADIO JETS NEAR A BLACK HOLE. Black holes don't just sit there spiderlike swallowing stars. They also fling out vast plumes of light-emitting material; these collimated streams can stretch for hundreds of thousands of light years. One of the closest of these conspicuous jets is to be found at the heart of galaxy M87, about 50 million light years away from Earth. Presumably the jet originates at an accretion disk surrounding a supermassive black hole. Previously radio mapping of this spot in the sky did not possess sufficient resolving power to see precisely where the jet begins. But now, by pooling the extended radiowave gathering power of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), the Very Large Array (VLA), and telescopes in Italy Sweden, Finland, Germany, and Spain, astronomers have nailed down the jet origin to within tenths of a light year of the black hole's location. The resulting image (see www.aip.org/png) shows that the jet's initial opening angle is 60 degrees, the widest ever seen for a jet, although the jet becomes much more focused (6 degrees) further downstream. (Junor et al., Nature, 28 Oct.; also www.nrao.edu/pr/m87.collimation.html)