HST Snaps Optical Jet of Quasar 3c 273

The Green (V band) image (left) shows the field around the quasar 3c 273 (courtesy Matthew Colless, David Schade and the CFHT). The optical jet can be seen SW of the quasar. The blue (B band) image (right) shows the optical jet as seen by the Faint Object Camera (FOC) on board the Hubble Space Telescope. For comparasion, the 11X11 arcesec FOC field of view is marked on the ground based CFHT image. The insert (right) is a Maximum Entropy reconstructionof the FOC image. This FOC image is derived from three linearly polarized images which show that the brightest knots are highly polarized (20%-50%). a letter which describes these data appears in the 9 September 1993 issue of Nature.