Plasma-jet movie is astronomy’s summer blockbuster

Black holes can’t emit light but the region around them can be extremely bright, ejecting beams of glowing plasma at more than 98% of the speed of light1. When studying these ‘relativistic jets’, astronomers must typically work with a small number of observations, so studying the jets’ dynamics is similar to trying to understand the plot of a film from several still images. But now, writing in Nature, Foschi et al.2 report an artificial-intelligence-driven algorithm called kine that changes the game.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02522-4

References Hovatta, T. & Lindfors, E. New Astron. Rev. 87, 101541 (2019). Foschi, M. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10988-5 (2026). Högbom, J. A. Astron. Astrophys. Suppl. 15, 417–426 (1974). Cohen, M. H. et al. Nature 268, 405–409 (1977). Marscher, A. P. & Gear, W. K. Astrophys. J. 298, 114–127 (1985). Lister, M. L. et al. Astrophys. J. Suppl. Ser. 234, 12 (2018). Download references

Competing Interests The author declares no competing interests.

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